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Employment Status and Political Participation: Does Exclusion Influence the Protest Behavior of the Young Unemployed?

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Economic and Political Change in Asia and Europe

Abstract

This chapter examines the relationship between employment status and the political participation of young people. We focus more specifically on the impact of long-term unemployment on the participation of youth. We aim to determine whether exclusion from the labor market deters the potential that youngsters have for political participation and therefore for taking part in the democratic process. We focus in particular on the propensity of young long-term unemployed people to engage in collective action and, more specifically, in protest activities. Using survey data drawn from a EU-funded research project, we find, firstly, that young unemployed and regularly employed youth do not differ significantly on five broad forms of participation considered (voting, contacting, group activities, consumer activities, and protest activities), nor do they differ on the overall political participation. Second, we focused on three kinds of exclusion that may arise from being unemployed (economic, social, and political) and looked at whether young unemployed and regularly employed youth differ in this regard. Here we found that the two groups differ significantly on all three counts, young unemployed being more excluded on all three counts, but the difference is greater on the economic dimension than on the social and political dimensions. Third, we zoomed in on the sample of young unemployed people in order to test for the effect of three kinds of exclusion on their propensity to engage in protest activities. Two forms of exclusion have a statistically significant effect on the use of protest activities by young unemployed people: economic exclusion and social exclusion. However, while economic exclusion encourages the young unemployed to be politically active, social exclusion seems to deter political participation, at least as far as protest is concerned.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Results presented in this chapter have been obtained within the project “Youth, Unemployment, and Exclusion in Europe: A Multidimensional Approach to Understanding the Conditions and Prospects for Social and Political Integration of Young Unemployed” (YOUNEX). This project is funded by the European Commission under the 7th Framework Programme (grant agreement no. 216122).

  2. 2.

    The political activities are the following: contacted a politician; contacted a national or local government official; worked in a political party; worked in a political action group; worn or displayed a badge, sticker, or poster; signed a petition; taken part in a public demonstration; boycotted certain products; deliberately bought certain products for political reasons; donated money to a political organization or group; taken part in a strike; contacted the media; contacted a solicitor or a judicial body for nonpersonal reasons; participated in an illegal action (e.g., blockade, building occupation); and participated in a violent action (e.g., violent demonstration, physical attack).In our analyses, we exclude participation in strikes as we are working on groups of youth with different employment status, not all of them having the same opportunities to take part in strikes. In particular, the unemployed have lower chances of having taken part in a strike.

  3. 3.

    These four types reflect in part the typology of political participation proposed by Teorell et al. (2007). We factor-analyzed the response items in order to confront this typology with our data. The factor analysis yielded four main factors, but some of the items did not correspond to their classification. We therefore adapted the typology to our present purpose.

  4. 4.

    This additional analysis was conducted on a smaller sample (135 respondents) as we had to exclude those who do not have the right to vote. It is worth noting that neither our indicator of economic exclusion nor the one of social exclusion yield a statistically significant effect on voting.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Département de science politique et relations internationales, Université de Genève, 40 Boulevard du Pont d’Arve, CH-1211, Geneva 4, Switzerland

    Marco Giugni & Jasmine Lorenzini

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  1. Marco Giugni
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Correspondence to Marco Giugni .

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  1. Kemmy Business School, Department of Economics, University of Limerick, KBS Building, Limerick, 000, Ireland

    Bernadette Andreosso-O'Callaghan

  2. , School of Language, Literature, Culture, University of Limerick, Millstream Building, Limerick, 000, Ireland

    Frédéric Royall

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Giugni, M., Lorenzini, J. (2013). Employment Status and Political Participation: Does Exclusion Influence the Protest Behavior of the Young Unemployed?. In: Andreosso-O'Callaghan, B., Royall, F. (eds) Economic and Political Change in Asia and Europe. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4653-4_11

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