Youth Citizenship and the European Union

Applying different perspectives to the question of how European youth identify with, trust, and engage with the EU, this book investigates how young people become active European citizens. It was originally published as a special issue of the European Journal of Developmental Psychology.

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This book applies a number of different disciplinary and geographical perspectives to ascertain whether and how European youth identify with the EU, trust EU institutions and engage in EU issues. It investigates the factors and processes that predict the different ways in which young Europeans engage (or do not engage) with social and political issues and become active European citizens.



The volume is based on results from the first two years of the Horizon 2020 CATCH-EyoU project (“Constructing AcTive CitizensHip with European Youth: Policies, Practices, Challenges and Solutions”). It addresses different dimensions of active citizenship in the EU and different processes and contexts that explain the construction of youth active citizenship, including societal-level factors such as policy context and media; interaction-level contexts such as school and family; and individual-level factors. The final chapter emphasizes the impact of the current historical context on the development of young Europeans’ civic identity and their understanding of the social and political reality.



With contributions from a variety of disciplines including psychology, political science, communications and education, and spanning geographic contexts across Europe, this book will be of interest to researchers studying contemporary European youth and the construction of young people’s identity. This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Journal of Developmental Psychology. Chapters 1 and 5 are available Open Access at https://www.routledge.com/products/9780367236557.