Youth Citizenship Participation: An Empirical Test of a Conceptual Model

On the citizenship participation issue the academic literature has put the focus on the political participation based on a generalized diagnostic, that is: the declining of voting turnout (Blais & Rubenson, 2013) and the socioeconomic bias (Scholzman, Verba & Brady, 2012) as threat of representativeness in democratic systems. Nevertheless, these diagnostic it is focused on the formal ways of participation typically labeled as political participation. This political disaffection of the younger cohorts contrasts with the increasing of youth participation in public demonstrations, demanding a series of civil and social rights (Marien, et.al, 2010). The consideration of other ways of participation have receive less attention and conceptualize and measure a broad citizenship participation it is challenge to capture the ways in which young people get involved in public life.

This paper encompasses different participation ways that are defined here under the umbrella of citizenship in youth population. It involves a civil dimension, which refers to the relationships with the community and informal or civil associations; as well as a civic dimension, that refers to the relationships with formal institutions and the political system, such as voting and membership to political parties.

Both sides of the phenomenon make the notion of citizenship as a more appropriate concept to encompass the dimensions of political socialization in younger cohorts. Second, in order to advance the empirical implications of this conceptual distinction, the paper estimates a measurement model of the citizenship concept, using a multigroup confirmatory factor analysis with the purpose of evaluate the citizenship conceptual model with a representative sample of 8^th grade students in 35 countries (n=130.000 students) that participated in the International Civic and Citizenship Study. Finally, the present paper evaluate the measurement invariance levels to assure that the measured construct between countries are the same, in order to improve the comparability.