Inequality and Youth Citizenship Participation: An Intergenerational Approach

Empirical evidence has shown consistently that resources are related with participation. For instance, people with higher levels of education, income and/or knowledge have more chances to participate. This inequalities it can be observed form the early years, demonstrating the relevance of intergenerational transmission of political inequalities and the political socialization processes. The general aim of this paper is to assess the direct and indirect influence of the socioeconomic background on students citizenship participation using different participation ways that are defined here under the umbrella of citizenship: It involves a community 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 activist participation. The specific objectives are two. First, to evaluate the direct relation among socioeconomic characteristics of families with different types of citizenship participation, arguing that these socioeconomic measures (i.e. parental education, socioeconomic status or books at home) could produce differentiated socialization's processes for different types of participation. Second, to evaluate the indirect socialization mechanism proposed by Brady, at. al. (2015), these are: familiy politization and status reproduction. The analyzed data was obtained from the International Civic and Citizenship Study (ICCS). This study was applied on 2009 to a eight-grade student's sample (n=140000) from 38 countries. Given the nested design characteristics of the study, multilevel structural equation model were estimated. General results indicate that socialization processes considering socioeconomic characteristics present differentiated patterns for different types of participation, particularly in the indirect processes.