Two Worlds of Participation: Young People and Politics in Germany

Abstract

Germany's political system is, in large part, based on John Stuart Mill's (1958) idea of a representative democracy, which aims to involve people in policy-forming processes. However, the constitution of a parliamentary democracy fosters tendencies towards a professionalization of participation, which leads to a strong cleavage between elites and other citizens. Drawing on original, quantitative and qualitative, empirical data we seek to show that this political culture fosters the existence of two parallel worlds: one is characterized by statutory regulated forms of engagement and qualified members; the other is inhabited by young people who engage rather in self-organized projects and institutions distant from patterns of conventional political engagement. There is, moreover, relatively little mutual exchange between these two worlds, which potentially endangers the essence of democracy. In this article a typology of different forms of political engagement is developed in order to better explain such parallel worlds and their consequences.