ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the engaged youth paradigm but hold a critical view on the balance between creative, as well as new forms of participation and the need for citizens that participate on an institutional level and in traditional ways. It proposes a resource-based approach to fill this gap. The chapter looks at political interest as one underlining factor whose impact has been shown in many different studies. It explains the political engagement of adolescents on social network sites (SNS) through a resource-based model of political engagement and participation. The chapter argues that when we consider forms of low-level activity, for example commenting and liking of political statements on SNS, substantially higher levels of political engagement are found. For adolescents, SNS might become vital news platforms and complement news from traditional journalistic platforms. Yet, it is an inherent feature of SNS that political news is not only consumed but often enough also commented.
