ABSTRACT
Research about young people’s relationship with politics has largely concerned their growing disengagement. Many scholars have underlined young people’s tendency to abandon institutionalized forms of participation and their traditional channels, such as political parties and unions. Young people are no longer more active than adults in the field of protest and unconventional participation, neither are they more informed, interested in politics or supportive of the basic principles of democracy, which is why A. Goerres suggests a ‘greying’ of Western democracies. In Italy, public expenditure has traditionally privileged old-age pensions rather than other sectors that would interest young people. Most research about young people, both in the Italian case and at an international level, focuses on the cohort who were young during the first years of the new millennium. Young people disillusionment, as Jedlowski notes, is not so much about the idea of progress as such, but rather entrenched in the possibility that wealth may be redistributed.
