Learning from the political theories of the young

While recent years have seen a burgeoning interest in situated and comparative analysis of youth civic engagement and political participation, questions of political socialisation have received relatively less attention. This is in part the product of a branching of scholarship in youth political participation underpinned theoretically by either a developmental or a social model of childhood and youth. Despite moving away from the classic theories of stage-based development, such as those offered by Piaget and Freud, towards a life-course perspective, developmental approaches have nonetheless often positioned young people as “becoming citizens”. In contrast, studies adopting a social model have argued for a difference-based conception of children and young people (Lister, 2008) “as citizens” whose political opinions and actions are obscured by adult-centric discourses and social structures. Consequently, though much of the research and collaboration in the field has been interdisciplinary, these two strands have developed in distinct trajectories. Yet both have tended to focus on what can be identified, measured, or qualified regarding what young people “know” and “do”, failing in the process to sufficiently explain how political socialisation is achieved (Frazer & Emler, 1997; Henn, Weinstein, & Wring, 2002; Coleman & Rowe, 2005).