Understanding Young People’s Political and Civic Engagement as a Counter to Democratic Backsliding

Incorporating young people’s voices into political and civic decision-making is fundamentally important in an era marked by democratic declines and rising authoritarianism around the globe1. A large cohort of motivated and engaged young people who participate in efforts to build communal trust, generate social cohesion, and promote political inclusion of diverse populations could help tip the scales in favor of democracy.

This report seeks to address the efforts needed to engage young people to support democratic resilience by answering the following questions from the IFES 2023-2026 Learning Agenda:

What types of informal civic engagement can lead to greater or more formal political and civic engagement among youth?
How can these types of engagement be harnessed to fight against authoritarianism?

This research and its findings and recommendations are intended for a broad audience. Answers to the questions will be useful for democracy and governance practitioners, donors, and policymakers, as well as others who engage with young people across the development and education sectors.

As explored throughout the report, individuals and groups engage in the political and civic life of their communities in many ways. To start, we need to understand this nuance. In this report, we classify activities based on two dimensions: goal, meaning whether an individual endeavors to influence political or civic outcomes, and procedure, capturing whether an engagement effort is formal or nonformal. Activities fall into four main categories along the two dimensions: formal political engagement (voting, joining a political party); formal civic engagement (taking a civic education course in school, participating in a club or association); nonformal political engagement (attending a protest, following political leaders on social media); and nonformal civic engagement (engaging with peers or community members on social issues of importance).

Through analysis of extant literature, IFES programming experience, and feedback from IFES program alumni, the authors identified four main findings:

• Finding 1: Civic and political engagement do not necessarily progress from nonformal to formal. Young people engage in nonformal and formal civic and political activities simultaneously.
• Finding 2: Civic education programming can accelerate engagement across civic and political life. Civic education can generate new and increased interest in participating in civic and political life, especially in closed and closing societies where other forms of engagement are systematically discouraged.
• Finding 3: A positive youth development (PYD) approach, combined with flexible training modalities, encourages the formal political and civic participation of young people. PYD approaches recognize the need for young people to have agency, facilitated by strong enabling environments, to make contributions as leaders and engaged democratic actors. Successful interventions target both factors.
• Finding 4: Youth engagement programs that integrate community action projects and network-building support the work of protecting democracy. Such activities extend learning beyond trainings or courses by giving young people opportunities to put their newly acquired knowledge and skills into practice. These experiences can lead to more sustained engagement in civic and political life, including direct engagement with – or demanding the engagement of – their government in the longer term. All these experiences prepare young people to hold their leaders to their commitments in a democratic society, become leaders themselves, and to identify and challenge anti-democratic tendencies if they emerge.

Based on these findings, the authors propose the following programmatic conclusions and recommendations:

• Adapt trainings and courses to their audiences. To contribute positively to young people’s civic and political participation, workshops, trainings, and courses should be responsive to and reflect their lived realities. Leadership opportunities should also be available for young people both during and after the training to advance their engagement in their communities and in public life beyond the classroom.
• Create opportunities for young people to develop and lead activities directly. Giving young leaders opportunities to design and implement their own activities encourages their civic and political participation. Furthermore, creating peer-to-peer connections across countries and regions and providing continuous learning opportunities through conferences, regional or international events, and study trips are ways to create broad networks of youth leaders.
• Utilize PYD approaches. The content and format of workshops, trainings, and courses should be adaptable and flexible to align with shifting sociopolitical conditions, what young people care about most, and the support they need as leaders. Integrating mental health and wellbeing support across programming and adapting activities so they are appropriate for different ages and developmental stages is a requirement for successful programming.
• Pursue cross-sectoral approaches. Programming should engage young people across sectors (for example, health, education, business, technology), not just those already engaged in Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance (DRG) spaces. Since human rights are relevant to everyone, programming that meets young people where they are, in seemingly unrelated sectors, stands to have a broader impact on overall engagement.
• Mainstream safeguarding and Do No Harm principles across all programming. Using tools such as risk assessment and mitigation, programs can prepare for risks and put safeguarding processes in place. Consider the unique experiences and circumstances of young people with intersectional identities, such as young people with disabilities or young Indigenous people, and their lived experiences, when designing inclusive and accessible curriculum and safe training modalities.
• Integrate effective strategies used to counter democratic backsliding into programming. Doing so contributes to participants’ knowledge gain and supports community-based initiatives that bolster democratic resilience. Strategies include providing opportunities for young people to network with their peers and apply what they learn in trainings to their own lives and communities. They can also promote democratic processes from the local to the national level through youth-led civic engagement activities such as community clean-ups, dialogue sessions that reach diverse populations across the community, and voter education campaigns that can encourage young people and first-time voters to vote.

The following policy conclusions and recommendations were also derived from the research:

• Invest broadly in all kinds of civic education. To support young people’s nonformal and formal participation, program design should take a holistic approach to civic education programming and include activities that engage young people in different spaces and using different approaches that support their engagement in public life.
• Learn about successful youth engagement across sectors. Donors and practitioners from different sectors should share lessons learned to strengthen work done in DRG spaces, add further nuance and context to programming, and better engage young people with diverse backgrounds and interests. Such relationships also create opportunities for two-way knowledge sharing, as DRG programming can also suggest ways to integrate human rights, civic engagement, and political participation into youth programming in other sectors.
• Require young people’s meaningful engagement across activities. To avoid tokenistic youth engagement, donors and practitioners must ensure that young people are more directly involved in program design. Beyond designing activities for young people, changes to proposal evaluations (e.g., higher scores for programs developed with young people’s input) and to program evaluation plans (e.g., disaggregation of indicators by age) should be required as a matter of policy.
• Embed monitoring and evaluation mechanisms into program investments that go beyond outputs to capture the long-term effects of youth engagement. Donors should support practitioners in developing robust monitoring and evaluation frameworks that effectively capture not only outputs from youth programming as well as longer-term outcomes and impacts achieved by program alumni to better assess the efficacy of the intervention. Donors and practitioners should also identify new ways to measure the impacts of digital and social media activities.
   

1. Varieties of Democracy Annual Democracy Report 2024.

Authors 
Sarah Timreck Youth Engagement and Civic Education Specialist Center for Applied Research and Learning 
Dr. Cassandra Emmons Global Democracy Data Advisor Center for Applied Research and Learning 

Contributors
Ashley Law Associate Director, Inclusive Development Q2 Impact
Katarina Moyon Learning Agenda Consultant