YOUTH 2020 - The position of young people in Slovenia

Youth political participation, social engagement, and extremism  169 TOMAŽ DEŽELAN, MITJA SARDOČ, AND KATJA NACEVSKI 4. YOUTH POLITICAL PARTICIPATION, SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT, AND EXTREMISM 4.1  THE CHALLENGES OF POLITICAL PARTICIPATION IN TODAY’S SOCIETY With regards to young people in today’s society, it is no longer possible to talk about the traditional separation between conventional and uncon- ventional political cooperation. This has been particularly prevalent in recent decades (cf., e.g., Barnes et al., 1979) and has been replaced by a widespread repertoire of political actions ranging from institutional po- litical participation to various forms of individual and collective social engagement in both physical and virtual spaces (see, e.g., Dalton 2009; Norris 2001; Loader et al. 2014; Marsh et al. 2007). Today, however, it is difficult to distinguish between the concepts of political cooperation and social engagement, since young people use both concepts in their political action and the two concepts together offer a broader conceptual field of young people’s socio-political participation. Strict separation would pose serious limitations in research and at the same time would not present a realistic picture of youth politics, which is a truly methodological limita- tion of many studies on youth political activities (see Marsh et al. 2007; Soler-i-Martí 2014). Past research in this context has also shown how wrong it can be to conclude that young people are “uninterested” in par- ticipating. The problemof lowparticipation does exist; however, it is com- plex and, above all, it is linked to participation in institutional policy. Namely, young people’s engagement comes from “outside” the usual boundaries of the political space and represents the emergence of individ- ualised, direct and unrepresentative styles of politics (Deželan 2015).