13:10 - 14:50
P3
Room:
Room: South Room 220
Panel Session 3
Anselm Hager - Does Giving Voice Increase Political Engagement?Evidence From a Natural Field Experiment
Clint Claessen - Ideology or career? On the individual and structural reasons for joining youth parties
Monika Bozhinoska Lazarova - Do parties ‘act as they talk’ about immigrant incorporation?
Mike Cowburn - How Local Factions Pressure Parties: Activist Groups & Primary Contests in the Tea Party Era
Michael Heaney - Party, Movement, and Representation of Independence Supporters in Scotland
Ideology or career? On the individual and structural reasons for joining youth parties
P3-2
Presented by: Clint Claessen
Clint ClaessenTamaki OhmuraStefanie Bailer
University of Basel
What drives young people to get active in youth parties? Research on parties’ youth organizations constitutes a major research gap in the political parties and political participation fields. While the few quantitative survey based studies investigating the motivation of youth party members (e.g. Bruter and Harrison 2009) find that the large majority of youth party members is intrinsically motivated, more qualitative accounts (e.g. Gruber 2009) describe career-oriented youth party members strategically planning their professional political career. Using a self-collected, broad-based survey of youth party members in Germany (2017-2018, n =1’293) we show that there is indeed a substantial group of career-oriented youth party members who can clearly be distinguished from the intrinsically ideologically motivated members. Moreover, we explain which individual factors and structural factors explain which youth party members are more career oriented. Our analysis highlights that these are rather younger men in larger parties with more regional offices in their home area providing them opportunities to develop their careers.