Active citizens under Eighteen: minors in political protests

Abstract

There is currently much public debate around the possibilities of political participation for minors. Although the West has historically evolved to perceive children as not developed enough to participate in politics, adolescence remains an ambivalent period between childhood and adulthood. This article investigates the question of how adolescents may participate in politics when the latter is associated primarily with the realm of adulthood. The adolescents’ participation in two recent protest movements in Russia are compared: the ‘For Fair Elections’ movement (2011–2012) and the anti-corruption rallies (2017–2018). In-depth interviews with the high-school-aged protesters collected in these two time periods show that the minors’ political practice has evolved in the period between two movements. In the 2011–2012 protest, adolescents understood themselves to be ‘immature kids’ in the political arena who were not able to act of their own accord. By the 2017–2018 protest, however, their self-perception had changed, with adolescent interviewees viewing themselves as full-fledged political actors. These differences are explained by the changes in political socialization of 2017–2018 adolescent protesters compared to their counterparts in 2011–12. At the end, the theoretical implications of the analysis for the cases outside of the Russian context are shown.