Civic and Political E-Participation of Young Immigrants: ‘Digital Hope’ for Inclusion?

Current Debates On Youth Participation

Civic and political participation has become a very trendy subject in scientific research (e.g.: Blais & Dobrzynska, 1998; Dalton, 2000; Putnam, 2000; Zukin, Keeter, Andolina, Jenkins, & Delli Carpini, 2006), and many studies concentrate their attention on groups identified as being at risk of exclusion and disempowerment, such as young people, women, migrants and/or ethnic minorities (e.g.: Shaw, 2002; Ahmad & Pinnock, 2007; Marsh, O’Toole, & Jones, 2007; Harris, Wyn, & Younes, 2010). However, some scholars emphasize that changes in attitudes toward politics nowadays must be acknowledged, particularly because young people are clearly transforming their relationship with the political sphere, and traditional forms of political engagement and participation are no longer viewed as attractive (Norris, 2002; Zukin et al., 2006). Therefore, claims about the apathy and disengagement of today’s youth are not considering the full extent of the phenomena, and the discussion about the decline in conventional forms of participation (Dalton, 2000) must be complemented with signs of emergence of other (new) forms of participation, probably related to the distrust caused by traditional mechanisms of participation (Norris, 2002).