YOUTH 2020 - The position of young people in Slovenia

Youth political participation, social engagement, and extremism  171 modern plural societies, they all have in common the shrinking of civic space and the related process of the so-called “regressive transitions” marked by social and political changes, in which democracies transition to more authoritarian forms of government. Shrinkage, or the narrow- ing of the space for citizens to act, is a symptom of much larger and more important changes in democratic global governance and the associated “responsibility gap” (Scholte, 2013). The latter is largely due to the so- called “neoliberal revolution” and its technocratic way of governing (Duggan, 2003). This is marked by a shift in governance with a simpli- fied understanding of the relationship between government, civil socie- ty, and other social spheres (e.g. the market), with a purely instrumen- talist view of civil society and its role in a democratic society, with a minimalist conception of democracy and its institutional framework, with a reductionist understanding of civic equality, and a distorted im- age of success as a central criterion of neoliberal global governance. All these processes are intertwined with declining participation in institu- tionalized democratic decision-making processes. This, combined with the above shifts in the democratic rule of modern civil systems, poses a serious threat to the stability of modern plural societies and the legiti- macy of democratic processes. In traditional research, political participation is divided into conven- tional and unconventional, and social engagement encompasses partici- pation in civil society (see Deželan 2015; Barnes 1979; Moyser 2003). Conventional political participation refers mainly to activities directly related to formal political institutions and processes, while unconven- tional refers to various protest and other forms that are less institution- alized and test the boundaries or are beyond the boundaries of institu- tional policy. In doing so, the term protest politics often appears, suggesting various forms of political action by active citizens (see Dalton 2009) both offline and online. It should be noted that political participa- tion has also become strongly subject to individual identities and expe- riences (see Marsh et al., 2007), and it is furthermore important to em- phasize that inmodernprotest politics the actors, targets, and repertoires of political action have changed (see Norris, 2001).