Conceptualising Young Citizens

Questions of youth participation are fundamentally about citizenship. Yet, both the statutory and discursive markers of youth citizenship in the UK and Australia are ambiguous and young people receive mixed messages about their rights, responsibilities and opportunities to exercise citizenship. In the context of an apparent decline in formal political engagement in advanced democracies, increased dissatisfaction with the institutions and mechanisms of democracy and limited development of democratic society and polity associated with social and economic inequality, there has been a renewed interest in theorising citizenship (for example, Turner, 1990). This has led to: claims that citizenship should play an independent normative role in political theory; renewed emphasis on the Aristotelian ‘good citizen’; and renewed emphasis on concepts of ‘active citizenship’ and ‘responsible citizenship’ in theory and public policy (for example, Kymlicka and Norman, 1994; Marsh et al., 2007: 33; Stokes, 2002: 24). As such, policy and research in the area of youth citizenship take place in the context of broader debates on democracy, the role of citizens, forms of participation and the ways in which these are being configured in a networked society.