Youth Citizenship and the European Union

Elvira Cicognani, Frosso Motti-Stefanidi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367236557
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000007916
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Biographies de sciences sociales

This book applies a number of different disciplinary and geographical perspectives to ascertain whether and how European youth identify with the EU, trust EU institutions and engage in EU issues. It investigates the factors and processes that predict the different ways in which young Europeans engage (or do not engage) with social and political issues and become active European citizens.

The volume is based on results from the first two years of the Horizon 2020 CATCH-EyoU project ("Constructing AcTive CitizensHip with European Youth: Policies, Practices, Challenges and Solutions"). It addresses different dimensions of active citizenship in the EU and different processes and contexts that explain the construction of youth active citizenship, including societal-level factors such as policy context and media; interaction-level contexts such as school and family; and individual-level factors. The final chapter emphasizes the impact of the current historical context on the development of young Europeans' civic identity and their understanding of the social and political reality.

With contributions from a variety of disciplines including psychology, political science, communications and education, and spanning geographic contexts across Europe, this book will be of interest to researchers studying contemporary European youth and the construction of young people's identity. This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Journal of Developmental Psychology. Chapters 1 and 5 are available Open Access at https://www.routledge.com/products/9780367236557.

1 Citizenship’s tangled web

Associations, gaps and tensions in formulations of European youth active citizenship across disciplines

Shakuntala Banaji , Sam Mejias , Ragne Kouts-Klemm, Filipe Piedade , Vassilis Pavlopoulos , Iana Tzankova , Alena Mackova and Erik Amnå

ABSTRACT

How does academic literature across various disciplines conceptualize and empirically address active citizenship? What are the potential benefits and dangers of dominant epistemological and ideological perspectives on ‘good citizenship’? Our paper engages with these questions by drawing on literature across 8 disciplines. We used textual analysis software T-LAB to quantify and visualize co-occurrences, word associations and thematic clusters in the abstracts of 770 texts gathered by eight country teams and original in-depth qualitative analyses of ideological positions and discourses taken up in a selection of key texts across the corpus. Our paper elaborates the findings: that many of the key themes surrounding young people and citizenship in the literature share little or no connection with European citizenship; that there is a significant gap in the literature on young European citizens; and that studies connected to internal, status-based factors connected to citizenship are far more prevalent than those examining external, practice-based factors or dissidence and dissent. Our conclusions examine the potential normative implications of the disjuncture between dominant conceptions and critical accounts of youth active citizenship.

Introduction

What do scholars, policymakers and practitioners mean when they discuss ‘active citizenship?’ How can conceptualisations of ‘European’ ‘youth’ and ‘active citizenship’ as discussed in cross-disciplinary literature form the basis of an integrated theory? These questions lie at the heart of the EU Horizon 2020 Constructing Active Citizenship with European Youth (CATCH-EyoU) project from which this paper arises. Through a series of multi-disciplinary research activities across eight countries,¹ CATCH-EyoU explores the nature of what it means for young people to conceptualize, understand and perform citizenship in different contexts and currents, and to do so in an active manner. One of the more significant aspects of the project centers on analyzing the ways in which the vast theoretical and empirical literature on young people and citizenship contributes to the discursive and evidentiary formation of a European youth active citizen imaginary. The notion of a European active citizen whose citizenship is expressed through participation is one which has gained prominence since the early 2000s amongst trans-European policy groups and non-governmental civic organizations (Biesta, 2009). These groups are ostensibly seeking to find ways of binding citizens, who have very different political histories and cultural interests, together into a participatory democratic community of new and old European Union member states. In tracing the history of this notion of European active citizenship through a range of policy directives, Milana (2008, p. 214) concludes that active citizen participation is a ‘dominant discourse’ currently used to ‘legitimize the union’ rather than to ensure actual inclusion of diverse groups of citizens. While the finding that democracy is operationalized more in favour of those who govern than in favour of citizens will not be new to those who work in the field of citizenship research, this definitional tension between the democratic interests of different groups of citizens and the interests of the newly expanding body, the European Union, in relation to ways of regarding and promoting active citizenship and participation at a time of heightened economic uncertainty and new media connection informs our sample and analysis (below) and differentiates it from previous reviews of literature on citizenship and civic action. In examining existing scholarship in this arena (Amnå & Ekman, 2014; Benhabib, 1999; Hoskins & Villalba, 2015; Torney-Purta & Amadeo, 2011 and many more) via a systematic meta-review, and in providing a critical epistemological take, this article presents original findings arising from (1) a quantitative thematic analysis of a corpus of 770 texts across 12 disciplines and sub-disciplines, and through (2) an in depth thematic qualitative analysis of methodologies, epistemologies, and ideological discourses in a selection of key texts across the corpus. Our findings problematize the key frames and themes that currently surround young people’s active citizenship in a European context. To facilitate this exercise, we analyzed abstracts of (N = 770) texts gathered by each country’s university teams. Taken together these built an aggregated data-set of academic literature in eight broad disciplines: Education, History, Media and Communications, Policy Studies, Political Science, Sociology, Philosophy and Psychology, and four sub-fields of Psychology: Social Psychology, Political Psychology, Community Psychology and Developmental Psychology.

Methods

Each participating country team collected and reviewed literature in specific disciplinary fields (see Table 1 below). In the first stage, using the T-LAB 9 software platform, our analysis highlighted associative thematic relationships between key terms and concepts related to youth active citizenship in Europe. In T-LAB 9, Word Associations create a visual chart highlighting co-occurrence and similarity relationships between individual words, to give an indication of some of the more closely associated terms and concepts in relation to our literature review of youth active citizenship in Europe. The key unit of analysis that formed the T-LAB 9 corpus were individual abstracts and textual summaries selected by each team as indicative of how each discipline or sub-discipline addressed youth active citizenship within the selected texts. In the second stage, a more limited sample of full texts (approx. N = 200) was subjected to detailed qualitative analysis. This is discussed further in the methodology section below.

Table 1. Number of collected texts per university and discipline/sub-discipline.

Discipline	University	N = 770
Sociology and Philosophy	London School of Economics and Political Science	N = 168
Political Science	Orebro University	N = 68
Education and History	University of Porto	N = 99
Media and Communications	University of Tartu	N = 49
Policy Studies	Masaryk University	N = 46
Developmental Psychology	University of Athens	N = 185
Social Psychology and Political Psychology	Friedrich Schiller University	N = 42
Community Psychology	University of Bologna	N =113

First stage quantitative textual analysis using T-LAB 9

The 8 teams each produced a list of the most important contributions in their respective fields of study that investigated issues related with youth, active citizenship, and Europe. They then selected between 40 and 200 significant texts in timeframes most relevant to their discipline or sub-discipline. Our rationale for the sample was organized around inclusion criteria which attended to: the disciplinary specialisms of each national team; publication quality, impact, and sphere of influence of texts using our searched keywords, synonyms or antonyms in each discipline or sub-discipline; language- and country-specific biases (particularly the need to attend to studies in languages other than English where these had significant theoretical implications); the need to attend to excluded voices and delegitimized forms of civic action that might affect definitions of active citizenship and Europeanness; and the need to pay attention to a wide range of conceptualisations of youth, participation, and active citizenship. While our initial searches yielded nearly a thousand texts, after...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction - Bringing the European Union closer to its young citizens: Youth active citizenship in Europe and trust in EU institutions
• 1 Citizenship’s tangled web: Associations, gaps and tensions in formulations of European youth active citizenship across disciplines
• 2 Being both - A European and a national citizen? Comparing young people’s identification with Europe and their home country across eight European countries
• 3 Apathy or alienation? Political passivity among youths across eight European Union countries
• 4 Young European citizens: An individual by context perspective on adolescent European citizenship
• 5 Cross-border mobility, European identity and participation among European adolescents and young adults
• 6 Trust in alternative and professional media: The case of the youth news audiences in three European countries
• 7 Commentary: Who among European youth are active citizens at the EU level and why?
• Index