How to Make the World a Better Place: Qualitative Findings on Young People’s Ideas of Political Participation and Expectations from Politics

Connecting to the overall concern of young people’s diminishing trust in core political institutions such as governments, parliaments and political parties, this presentation explores young people`s ideas of how they can contribute to social change. Our research is based on the theoretical approach of young people’s agency (e.g., Nico and Caetano, 2021) which means understanding young people as actors of social change and as contributing to shaping society and politics. We have investigated if and in which ways young people feel responsible for making the future a better place, or, if they trust in adult institutions to solve the problems.

For our contribution in the roundtable session, we have used data which was collected in the frame of the “Global Gen Z Study” carried out with members of Generation Z aged 18-26 in 2022 in 31 countries worldwide (Seemiller and Grace, 2024). We have focused on the open survey question “How can your generation make the future a better place?” and consider short text answers from about N=500 Austrian young adults. For data analysis we have conducted thematic analysis on brief texts, applying the structured tabular approach (ST-TA) (Robinson, 2022). This approach combines deductive and inductive elements of qualitative data analysis and is well suited for analyzing a large number of brief texts.

In the process of data analysis, political action appeared as a main category of how young people want to engage for a better future: Thereby, political action includes conventional as well as unconventional forms of political engagement. The young people’s voices contain many hints of how trust in political institutions could be reestablished. For example, they miss to be better represented in politics, and they would like to see politicians take action for a better future.