Insights – Meaningful Youth Political Participation in Europe

This research on youth political participation builds on the long-standing work of the EU-Council of Europe youth partnership in this area. It started with Revisiting youth political participation – Challenges for research and democratic practice in Europe (Forbrig 2005) and further developed from the symposium “The future of young people’s political participation: questions, challenges and opportu- nities”, held in 2019 (Bacalso 2019; EU-Council of Europe youth partnership 2019), and on its outcomes. This work included literature reviews (Galstyan 2019), toolkits and perspectives of experts (Deželan 2018; Farrow 2018; Kiilakoski 2020), and the Compendium of practices (Yurttagüler and Martinez 2020). Young people’s participa- tion was also further explored by the partnership in 2020 and 2021, with a focus on young people’s access to rights, particularly their right to assembly (Pantea 2021), and drew on Shrinking democratic civic space for youth (Deželan and Yurttagüler 2021).