Youth movements and opposition parties in times of autocratization: Turkey and Serbia

Across autocratizing contexts, Generation Z movements have emerged as a prominent force of democratic resistance. Yet their engagement with opposition parties varies considerably. Existing literature explains youth–party engagement through ideological affinity and political trust, but these factors alone cannot account for variation across autocratizing contexts; we instead argue that it is shaped by the combination of opposition parties’ threat capacity and the level of repression they face. When opposition parties possess strong threat capacity and are subject to severe repression, youth movements interpret repression as a signal that these parties represent a credible challenge to the regime and a potentially effective vehicle for democratic change. Under such conditions, engagement becomes strategically attractive. By contrast, when opposition parties have weak threat capacity and face relatively low levels of repression, youth movements perceive them as electorally ineffective and are more likely to pursue autonomous forms of activism. We illustrate this argument by comparing two autocratizing contexts: Turkey, where youth–party engagement is relatively strong, and Serbia, where it is weaker. The analysis triangulates social media evidence from accounts of opposition parties and university solidarity groups with interviews conducted with student activists in Istanbul, Ankara, Belgrade, and Novi Sad.