Citizens in Training: How institutional youth participation produces bystanders and active citizens in Finland

As a response to challenges faced by representative forms of democracy, public authorities increasingly offer young citizens opportunities for democratic participation. These youth participation policies are supported by research findings on political socialization, linking citizenship skills and habits learnt at a young age with an increased likelihood of political engagement later in life.

Studies of institutional youth participation practices have mostly been conducted through surveys and interviews. However, little is known about patterns of interaction and situated culture in institutional youth participation practices. Moreover, while a main concern when organizing and evaluating democratic participation has been the legitimacy of the process, less attention has been paid to studying why some people commit themselves to these forms of political participation while others fail to be engaged.

For this study, multi-sited ethnographic participant observation was carried out in the Helsinki metropolitan area in 2015–2018. The fieldwork was conducted in a municipal youth council and in several neighbourhoods doing participatory budgeting. These observations were complemented by interviews with the 13–20year-old participants.

The study identified four outcomes of engagement in institutional youth participation: transformation, accumulation, externality, and exit. Where some participants found a safe haven for their burgeoning interest in civic action, transforming them into engaged citizens or strengthening their privileged social position, others found these scenes and the corresponding styles of engagement less useful, opting to leave the participatory process, either with a strengthened sense of externality or in search of a more resonant scene of engagement. These outcomes were contingent on the ‘style of interaction’ on one hand and the ‘resonance of the scene of participation’ on the other. Although participatory opportunities in this research were designed by public authorities to be easily accessible spaces for the political participation of young people, it emerged that participation was curtailed by barriers affecting whose voices were heard and which ideas were put forward. Two corresponding scene styles, empowerment and individualism, were recognized, highlighting the limited utility of implementing a specific style of participation on a citywide scale without accounting for differences in the desires and needs of the target group.

The overall structure of the study takes the form of eight chapters. The first four include the introduction, a review of the state of research related to the subject at hand, and the main theoretical references and research methods used. The fifth and sixth chapters are empirical descriptions of the two research cases, a municipal youth council in the capital region and participatory budgeting in Helsinki. These chapters are followed by a discussion and a presentation of conclusions in view of youth participation and democratic evolution.