Exploring youth political activism in the United Kingdom: What makes young people politically active in different organisations?

This article challenges the current research on youth disengagement by asking what makes young people active in different political organisations. It applies the classic civic voluntarism model to explore which factors (skills, attitudes, mobilisation and motivations) best distinguish between young activists in political parties’ youth factions, the British Youth Council and the 2010 National Union of Students demonstrations. The results from multinomial logistic regression show that there are differences especially in the civic and political attitudes. The results also show that different organisations attract different kinds of young people, which can be used to (re-)engage young people in politics.