Abstract
This article provides a critical examination of a common form of adult attempts to promote civic engagement among young people, namely, youth advisory councils. While youth councils have been widely celebrated as an effective way to integrate young people into political processes, little research has explored why some politically active youth choose to leave, or refuse to join, youth councils. Based on two qualitative studies of politically active teens throughout North and Latin America, the authors argue that teenage activists possess valuable dissident knowledge of, and critical perspectives on, the potential for youth advisory councils to promote youth political power. We argue that young activists understand democracy in ways that are fundamentally different from that offered to them by youth councils. Youth activists put forth a theory of democracy that emphasizes authority and impact, not just voice; they understand democracy as representing collective concerns and perceive youth councils as elitist and nonrepresentative; and they emphasize the value of controversy and contentious politics while expressing anxiety that youth councils can function as modes of social control that tame and channel youth dissent, rather than opportunities to foster youth political power.
In a widely read Boston Globe article, civic engagement expert Robert Putnam (2008) interpreted the phenomenal rise of the youth vote in the 2008 presidential election as a signal that a new politically engaged generation is emerging. In contrast, many youth civic engagement (YCE) scholars have cataloged what they see as the waning civic spirit, lack of political knowledge, and general apathy of young people (Delli Carpini, 2000; Henn et al., 2002; Thomson et al., 2004). However, whether they see an alarming decline or an encouraging spike in youth political participation, ‘politics’ is frequently conceptualized as any formal political process (such as voting) in line with state-sanctioned channels for political participation. Furthermore, when Putnam praised the ‘youth’ vote, he specifically meant the college-aged youth who were old enough to vote for Obama. Yet, others have noted that our concern for youth political engagement should extend beyond voting-aged youth (Billig et al., 2005; Reidel, 2002). These scholars argue that we should be seeking to promote formal political participation among teenaged youth to ensure the survival of a healthy democracy among future generations of voters. This is why policy makers, youth advocates, scholars, and the news media regularly identify youth councils as primary spaces from which young people are shaping their communities (Martin et al., 2007; Matthews, 2001). These councils are celebrated sites of political agency for youth who do not yet have access to the vote and are proclaimed to be vital spaces for the democratic training of the next generation. Furthermore, because they provide a unique opportunity for young people to directly access policy makers, they are viewed as a powerful way for youth to make political change. Martin et al. (2007) write,
As youth councils embed themselves in the policy-making process, they will become an integral part of how state and local governments set policy and make decisions. This increase in meaningful youth engagement will lead to more and better policies to address the issues that matter to young people. (p. 33)
As Westheimer and Kahne (2004) have argued, however, normative assumptions about the meaning of good citizenship are deeply embedded within YCE programs and curricula. YCE programs, as they have developed since the late 1980s and early 1990s, are not merely designed to empower young people to participate. They are also designed to produce and reproduce a particular political order and particular types of citizens. We need to ask, therefore, what kind of democracy and what kind of citizenship is being promoted by these various programs? What is the proposed political and civic role of the empowered youth citizen?
In this article, we will draw on extensive empirical research with high-school activists to illuminate how their alternative interpretations of democracy and participation draw our attention to some of the significant limits of youth councils as an idealized form of youth political engagement. The young activists who we met between 2002 and 2006 were highly politically engaged but have chosen to do their political work in a different manner. Many of them attempted to work with and through conventional YCE programs but left these spaces dissatisfied. Therefore, they are a rich source of critical insight into this model. Listening to the voices of these highly politicized and engaged youth gives us a distinct, youth-centered perspective on some of the flaws and failures of these programs. While Matthews (2001) gives us an important overview of the strengths and weaknesses of youth councils based on the insights of youth council participants themselves, we argue that additional critical analyses of youth councils can be gleaned from young activists who have rejected this model entirely in favor of alternative forms of democratic participation. Young activists possess valuable dissident knowledge about this topic.
We will argue that young activists understand democracy in ways that are fundamentally different from that offered to them by youth councils. By analyzing their commentary on youth councils and related forms of YCE, we are able to highlight the contrasts and tensions between their own approach to democracy and citizenship and that which they see offered in more formal programs. Based on their alternative theorization of participation, these young activists argue that youth councils are a highly constrained model for youth citizenship and that they even promote nondemocratic forms of political participation for young people. This article thus serves two primary purposes: it aims to explore some of the ways that young activists understand democracy and citizenship and draws attention to some of the assumptions undergirding the widespread celebration of youth councils as the ideal form of YCE. While other scholars of youth have critiqued some YCE programs from the perspective of liberation psychology and youth development (Watts and Flanagan, 2007), our analysis is instead rooted in social movement scholarship and critical political theory. As such, it emphasizes the potential political and social, rather than personal and developmental, implications of these two contrasting approaches to youth citizenship (youth movements and youth councils).
In the following, we first provide a partial picture of the institutional domain of youth councils. We move on to briefly describe the terrain of youth movements from which our activists’ theorizations emerge. We then look at how youth activists’ notions of democratic participation make visible several serious problems in the model of political participation embedded in youth councils. First, we note that youth activists put forth a theory of democracy that emphasizes authority and impact, not just voice. In contrast, youth councils do not ensure that young people’s voices will be taken seriously by adults in power. Second, we argue that youth activists understand democracy as representing collective concerns and that these state-sanctioned YCE opportunities are instead often elitist. We then discuss the importance of teenage activists’ perceptions of these programs as sites of social control rather than opportunities for critical thinking and dissent. Building on the critical perspectives of youth activists, we argue that youth councils, as currently constructed, represent a highly constrained form of democratic participation. Finally, we offer suggestions for how the alternative visions of youth activists might be used to enhance and strengthen YCE programs, including youth councils.
YCE, youth councils, and democracy
YCE programs can be understood as an organized and extensive response to a commonly described ‘crisis’ of youth disengagement (Delli Carpini, 2000; Henn et al., 2002; Thomson et al., 2004; Williamson, 2002). In contrast to the scholars and youth advocates in many parts of the world who reference the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and its participatory clause as a rationale for creating programs for youth participation (Graham and Fitzgerald, 2010; Kjorholt, 2002), US scholars regularly argue that increasing YCE is vitally important to the future health of US democracy and civil society (Youniss et al., 2002). Designed to remedy young people’s disengagement and to encourage their involvement in public life, YCE programs receive significant financial support from governments and numerous private foundations including the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts, and the William T. Grant Foundation.
For the past 15 years, scholars of YCE have been paying substantial attention to the role of community service in young people’s civic identities (Billig et al., 2005; Metz et al., 2003; Owen, 2000; Yates and Youniss, 1998; Zeller, 1993). Volunteerism has been not only a major focus in the academic literature on YCE but also a key aspect of youth policy in the past decade (Kirby et al., 2006; Metz et al., 2006). Significantly, it appears that the many programs and opportunities for youth community service are indeed ‘paying off’. Recent research has found that today’s youth are, in fact, volunteering at higher rates than previous generations did at their age (Marcelo, 2007). However, involvement in service is not the only stated goal of civic engagement programs. Many reports have noted that while today’s youth may indeed be volunteering, service-learning programs have not necessarily led to an associated increase in young people’s broader political knowledge or their engagement in voting or formal politics (Andolina et al., 2003; Howett, 1999; Sitaraman and Warren, 2003). Studies have asked whether participation in various types of community service as a teenager increases the likelihood of young adult voting (Metz et al., 2003) or whether it has an impact on young people’s knowledge about institutional politics and government (Billig et al., 2005; Milner, 2008). Increasing youth knowledge about, and participation in, the institutions of government is thus one of the long-term goals of many youth community service activities.
This concern with young people’s formal political engagement is the impetus for the expansion of YCE programs that aim to involve young people directly in the institutions of government. Judith Bessant (2004) notes that ‘most Western governments now advocate enhanced youth participation as part of a discourse about modern citizenship, so much so that it has become a policy cliché to say increased youth participation will ‘empower’ young people’ (p. 387). The widespread creation of youth councils, youth assemblies, and other consulting and/or decision-making bodies at various levels of government is the practical result of this social, political, and academic concern. The anxiety about youth political engagement (specifically, formal political engagement) underwrites the ongoing celebration of this specific type of program and enables its depiction by both scholars and governments as an ideal way to involve young people in politics. Programs for involving young people in the institutions of government are an oft-celebrated mechanism for addressing what many scholars see as a key problem among today’s youth. This particular method of engaging young people in politics is a privileged type of YCE program (Matthews, 2001) and therefore deserves special critical attention.
According to a report commissioned and distributed by The National League of Cities and the National Conference of State Legislatures, there are more than 140 city or town youth councils and 12 statewide councils across the United States (Martin et al., 2007). Obviously, there is some variation in the structure, level of authority, and scope of responsibility among these councils and advisory boards (Matthews, 2001). However, they also share many commonalities; these common practices and approaches are the subjects of the critique that follows. The stated goal of most youth councils is to connect young people (usually high-school students) to policy makers, giving them an opportunity to express their opinions to these decision makers on subjects related to the lives of young people. The youth who participate are considered to be experts on youth issues. Youth councils work specifically on ‘youth policy’, and the young people are not generally consulted about other policy domains that impact their lives. Youth councils are formalized institutions and are almost always an ‘official’ part of the government structure, some authorized by statute and others by executive order. Councils usually have adult staff who coordinate the council and provide training and support for the youth. The councils meet on a regular or semi-regular basis, giving the young people a chance to discuss their policy ideas, do research, receive training, and plan out their policy agenda and recommendations. Youth councils, as advisory bodies, are supposed to connect young people with policy makers. Therefore, youth councils use various mechanisms to share young people’s policy proposals with members of their city councils, state legislators, governors, or sometimes only with the staff and advisors of these elected officials. Most councils involve between 15 and 25 youth. These young people are generally appointed to their positions or have applied and have been selected for participation; they are not elected by their peers. Youth councils, then, involve a small number of youth in the formal institutions of government, educating them about the policy process and giving them an opportunity to communicate with policy makers as experts on youth issues.
Youth councils embody a particular understanding of democratic citizenship; however, the characteristics of the model of democracy envisioned are only rarely specified in much of the literature on YCE. In one case, Youniss et al. (2002) write that ‘in non-democratic nations that do not provide formal channels of political participation, civic competence needs to be defined in terms of informal behaviors that include covert acts of advocacy, collaboration and community building’ (p. 125). Democracy is thus largely defined by the provision of ‘formal channels’ for participation in the nation-state. Other forms of political engagement, including the above-mentioned ‘informal behaviors’, are only seen to be part of civic competence in contexts where such channels are absent. Youth councils, as institutions for working with the government through formal channels, thus embody an ideal form of youth participation and civic competence within this particular vision of democracy. This is a model of democracy that is heavily state-centered, emphasizes rational debate and discussion, presumes the neutrality of the state, and believes that the state form sufficiently incorporates diverse interests (in this case, the interests of youth) through its deliberative mechanisms. In short, it is an approach to participation that is deeply and thoroughly rooted in liberal theories of democracy and citizenship.
In contrast, social movement scholars and feminist, anarchist, and other theorists of participatory democracy have argued that liberal models of democracy overstate the democratic potential of institutionalized political channels and obscure a multitude of locations of both power and resistance. In both the resource mobilization and political process approaches to understanding social movements, state power is not pluralistic but rather elitist, where the established political system represents the interests of the powerful and marginalizes the less powerful (McAdam, 1982). Given the concentration of power within the state, social movements become an important response to these power imbalances and represent some of the only ways in which marginalized people (including youth) can claim social, economic, and political power (Piven and Cloward, 1979) and alter the composition of the ‘policy monopolies’ that dominate political decision making (Meyer, 2003). Numerous feminist political theorists have argued that definitions of politics and political participation that emphasize involvement in parties, voting, and legislation rely upon a gender-specific view of the male-dominated institution of the state (Bookman and Morgen, 1988; Elshtain, 1981; Jaggar, 1983; Pateman, 1985). Power, and therefore political participation, exists not only at the level of the state but within a variety of other institutions and fields (Armstrong, 2002), as well as in discourse, consciousness, and the processes of subjectification (Foucault, 1980; Scott, 1990). Democratic participation, especially for women and for youth, often happens outside the state (Kaplan, 2004).
Critics of liberal democracy have argued that it is a political form that centralizes power. This concentrated decision-making authority is directly challenged by theories of radical, direct, and participatory democracy (Eschle, 2001; Hardt and Negri, 2004; Kaplan, 2004; Lummis, 1996). In his analysis of school democratization in Brazil, McCowan (2010) argues that prefigurative processes, in which youth participants have a direct role in creating the society they envision, represent a form of participatory democracy that goes beyond simply preparing youth for effective participation in the existing system. Youth activist critiques of youth councils and their expectations for meaningful democratic political participation resonate with these perspectives on participatory democracy.
Methods
Our analysis is taken from two ethnographic studies of youth activism between the years 2002 and 2006, collectively. Each study was conducted separately, and each author coded her own data. One study, conducted between 2002 and 2004, focused on the ways in which race, class, gender, and age inequalities shape the politics of urban youth activism in the United States (second author, H.R.G.), and the other study, conducted between 2005 and 2006, focused on girls’ participation in alter-globalization movements throughout the Americas (first author, J.K.T.). Although our major focus was on young people’s political participation in progressive social movements, we both discovered the extent to which young activists’ approaches to political engagement were shaped by negative experiences with, and critiques of, more conventional YCE models of youth participation. J.K.T. presents data from a larger study of teenage girl activists across five cities in the Americas: Buenos Aires, Caracas, Mexico City, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Vancouver. Seventy-five girls who were part of her study ranged in age from 13 to 19 years, but the majority were either 16 or 17 years old. These girls were all actively involved in social movements. They organized around a wide range of social problems including labor issues and youth labor rights, educational reform, environmental racism, economic justice, corporate power, human rights, gender equality, antiracism, media democracy, indigenous rights, and political repression, to name a few. In addition to being part of issue-specific groups and campaigns, they were also involved in a wide variety of socialist, communist, anarchist, Zapatista-informed, feminist, and other broadly Left parties; collectives; and youth organizations. In each city, J.K.T. conducted, recorded, and transcribed in-depth, semi-structured interviews with these girls in English or Spanish. She attended and took extensive field notes on a wide range of political events involving teenage girls and collected printed materials from the organizations in which these girl activists participated.
H.R.G. conducted research on youth activism in two US west coast urban areas: Portland, Oregon, and the larger East Bay of the Bay Area in California (mostly Oakland), in order to understand teenagers’ political organizing strategies in the larger context of race, ethnic, class, and gender differences. This comparative study focused on two youth activist networks: a mostly White, middle-class Portland citywide high-school student network who organized around issues such as the war in Iraq, corporate power, and school budget cuts and a network of mostly working-class and poor students of color in Oakland who organized against the war in Iraq, school budget cuts, increased standardized testing, and the prison industrial complex, among many other educational and social justice issues. In addition to attending teen activists’ strategizing meetings, community forums, rallies, protests, and retreats in both sites over a 2-year period, H.R.G. supplemented this ethnographic research with 40 semi-structured in-depth interviews with both boy and girl activists, and some of their adult allies, in both sites.
In the course of comparing our research, we discovered that both of us had found significant and quite similar patterns in our subjects’ critical analyses of and negative experiences with YCE models of participation. Having both identified similar trends, we began to combine our data around this theme, compiling quotes and ethnographic examples related to young activists’ experiences with and perceptions of YCE approaches. In doing so, the patterns became even clearer, and the findings outlined here represent a strong current throughout both of our data sets.
Our data draw from politically active youth who left conventional YCE models of participation, such as youth councils, or activist youth who elected to never pursue youth councils at all. Therefore, these young people’s testimonials can give us neither a full scope of the ways in which youth councils or similar YCE structures function nor a comprehensive view of youth councils’ successes and failures. This is a sector of youth who are rejecting this model in favor of other forms of political participation such as social movements. We are interested in their critical perceptions of youth councils insofar as these critiques reveal young people’s expectations of, and approaches to, democracy. We believe that their critical perceptions and ultimate rejection of this model are useful for better theorizing youth democratic participation and political development, and for suggesting changes to the youth council model in order to enhance its democratic potential.
Having a voice or making a difference
The youth activists who we encountered in our research frequently described their work outside of the government as a form of democratic participation. In fact, some even argued that it is more democratic to be part of social movements than to work with groups such as youth councils and youth assemblies. This argument was often based on their interpretation of democratic engagement as ‘making a difference’ in one’s community. For example, when talking about young people’s participation in democracy, Rachel, a 16-year-old activist in Vancouver, said that ‘there are a lot of teenagers who are aware of issues and who go out and try to make a difference’.
Lisette, an 18-year-old activist from the Bay Area, discussed the very small projects of city youth councils and how unsatisfying these are for politically engaged youth. She had gone to her city’s youth council hoping to find a space to make a positive impact on her community but found that the group was ‘trying to organize like a basketball tournament to raise money for I don’t know what’. She said she ‘was trying to do things, but what was I doing planning a tournament? What does that really do? Does that have any real like power or importance? I don’t think so’. Lisette wanted to improve her community and to address issues of environmental racism and the toxic conditions of her neighborhood but found that youth councils were not the space where she could do this work. Like many other youth we met, Lisette articulated a vision of engagement that centered on having an impact in one’s community, in doing things that have ‘power or importance’. Instead, she found that her local youth council did not offer this type of engagement but only the chance to do things that, from her perspective, did not really matter. It did not let her ‘make a difference’.
In the United States, the only youth council that can introduce legislation (but not vote on it) is the Maine statewide council (Martin et al., 2007). Other councils are simply advisory bodies with no formal authority. They are opportunities for youth to voice their opinions in political space. Unfortunately, previous research indicates that despite calls for youth voice, adults are often reluctant to actually include children and youth in decisions, leading to some manipulation, decoration, and tokenism (Williamson, 2002). In J.K.T.’s previous research with teens of Washington, DC who were working on developing a new sexual harassment policy, for example, the girls expressed a great deal of anger over their treatment by school board members. They were particularly angry at being referred to as ‘policy sprouts’ and were frustrated with how board members were always condescending to them (Taft, 2006). In his critical analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of youth councils, Matthews (2001) notes that many youth who serve on youth councils report perceptions of tokenism, disempowerment, and lack of ownership over the agenda and processes of their councils.
Sixteen-year-old Itzel, who had briefly participated in a youth council that addressed school reform and school violence in Oakland, echoed many other teen activists’ perceptions of adultism in these youth councils:
Like, at adult meetings, they tokenize your ideas a lot of the times. Like, they come in with an agenda and they ask you for input, knowing that they are already going to do what they’re going to do. So, its just like, a lot of times it is pointless for you to even be in there with the adults.
Like many activist teens who join these youth councils, Itzel’s experience with adultism, and her own perceptions of being tokenized, discouraged her from further participating in this state-sanctioned form of politics. Like Lisette, Itzel sought a form of democratic engagement where she would feel like she was making a difference, where her ideas might actually have influence, and where she could have some control over determining the agenda.
Distrust of youth councils as potential spaces for meaningful engagement comes from not only first-hand experience. Many activist youth are highly aware that they have no formal political participation rights in their everyday lives. Given this, the prospect of joining a government-sponsored youth council does not appear as politically effective as becoming active in broader community and youth social movements. Although champions of youth councils conceptualize them as unique ‘in-between’ opportunities that give youth a chance to become politically involved without giving these youth more extensive formal political participation rights, many youth activists see a stark contrast between being ‘in the system’ and being ‘outside the system’. For many, there is no legitimate ‘in-between’. Judith Bessant (2004) argues that youth participation programs merely pretend to give youth decision-making power, but in the final instance, they fail to include youth in democracy. This is because youth are still not given the right to vote, a fundamental component of liberal democratic citizenship. The youth activists in our studies were well aware that they lacked this fundamental component of citizenship and viewed community movements as much more effective vehicles for social change rather than the limited state-sponsored forms of youth engagement represented by youth councils. Sixteen-year-old Portland youth activist Troy puts it this way:
I think one of the coolest things about the youth movement is that they can take radical direct action and be totally accountable for it. Because if they are not going got give us a voice, then fuck them. If you’re not going to be able to participate in the system, then you are outside the system and there it is.
For youth who are highly cognizant of their everyday political marginalization as youth, political opportunities ‘outside the system’, such as social movements, are preferable to more limited forms of quasi-integration into the system.
Having developed a keen sense of their own political marginality vis-à-vis the state, many of these youth became wary of formal governmental decision-making processes and began to seek more dissident forms of political action. Emily, a 17-year-old from San Francisco, had been active in numerous antiwar marches starting in eighth grade. In this process, she said that she learned that the government really did not need to listen to people, whatever they do. She said that ‘democracy is supposed to be governed by the people, but it’s governed by like four people’. Instead of assuming that democracy happens in the government, Emily tried to find ways to have political impact in other spaces: ‘surrounding myself in a community of activism and social awareness makes me say my voice’. Emily, like many other youth activists, found more possibility for political participation and democratic engagement in the context of her activist organization than she might have in government-sponsored activity.
The issue of effectiveness, of making a difference in one’s community and in the world, was of central importance in youth activists’ commentary on democratic participation. They are involved in activism because they see it as a way to have impact, to do things that matter. Youth councils, on the contrary, appear primarily as spaces for expression, spaces for voice but without any real obligation for the adult representatives to listen to these young people’s voices. They do not have the political authority to make policy decisions. In short, we can see here that youth activists and youth councils propose two distinct approaches to understanding the goal of political participation: one emphasizes the opportunity for self-expression and sees potential in young people’s proximity to adult policy makers and the other focuses on making a difference in the world through a collective effort.
A chosen elite or creating collectives
Youth councils are imagined as representative bodies, but they are faced with serious problems of representation within their internal membership structures. Howard Williamson (2002) writes that youth participation organizations and councils are not necessarily very representative or democratic and that ‘more disadvantaged groups of young people are even less likely to be involved in youth organizations’ (p. 96). YCE programs aimed primarily at government involvement are also likely to embody inequalities of access and involve only elite youth (Rosenthal et al., 2001). Referring to the young people who are part of these programs, Liliana offered her perception of those who participate in youth councils:
They are children of power. They are completely hierarchical, completely authoritarian, super elitist, and I truly don’t want to participate in that. I don’t want to be part of that kind of power, part of the power of just a few.
As Liliana points out, youth councils do not adequately challenge what she perceives to be the concentration of political power and are therefore inimical to the political project of many young activists. She also perceives these youth representatives to be elitist.
In their articulation of democratic political participation, youth activists prioritize working together in the development of collective responses to social problems, rather than having a few people who are ‘in charge’. Erica, an environmental activist, said that she thinks democracy means that
change can happen, based on what the people want, not what whoever happens to be in power wants … When we make decisions, it’s based on what we see from the bottom, from here, what we see as what needs to be addressed.
When asked whether there were spaces in her life that were democratic, she continued, ‘the environmental club because there’s no one person … You can’t just have one person decide what needs to be done, you have to have ideas from lots of people’. Erica and many other youth activists highlight this project of working together in open groups that anyone can join as a vital piece of democratic political participation.
In the case of youth councils, the youth who serve on them do not actually represent other youth but are described as if they do. Although the most significant US report on youth councils claims that they are ‘representative bodies’, the next sentence of this same report specifies that ‘members are appointed’ (Martin et al., 2007: 18). Young people apply to be on these boards, their applications are reviewed, and then some applicants are accepted. Upon examining the processes for selecting youth to participate in youth councils, we find that adults maintain control of the selection process, and other youth seem to have no say in which youth serve on these councils to ‘represent’ them. If members are solely appointed and selected by adults, are they really authentic, democratic representatives of youth? From the perspective of youth activists, this is a significant problem of youth representation: the youth involved do not necessarily represent other youth nor engage with other youth in their schools and communities to create collective ideas about solutions to community problems. Arguing for more horizontal forms of democratic engagement (Taft, 2011), they reject the youth councils as a form of participation that produces a few student ‘leaders’ rather than empowering many youth for political action.
Adult supervision or youth-led dissent
In addition to experiencing youth councils to be ineffective and elitist, young activists also perceived them to be repressive sites of social control rather than youth-led spaces for critique. Dissent and critical thinking are central to their understanding of democratic participation, and they therefore see youth councils as an attempt to constrain the more radical elements of youth politics. In both of our studies, we discovered that youth activists in school and broader community contexts were quite aware of adults’ efforts to regulate their political expression. Many youth in our studies shaped their critiques of adult-sanctioned YCE opportunities from their own experiences with adult repression. Even if they did not participate in specific YCE programs before turning to youth-led social movements, the distrust they developed of adults in power, in the context of their own youth-led activism, was often enough to make them wary of adult-led YCE efforts. Eighteen-year-old Portland activist Sunnie, who tried to raise students’ consciousness about homophobia on her campus by organizing a gay–straight alliance at her school, met with administrative resistance. Sunnie explained this resistance as stemming from the administration’s wishes to keep the school ‘safe’ from political conflict or confrontation:
The school doesn’t want … like if it is going to create conflict, they don’t want it. So that was definitely the message that I got. They wanted to keep things civil, they didn’t want anyone to try to protest or do anything of that sort, because they wanted a very quiet school.
Sunnie suggests here that conflict can in fact be a valuable and important feature of democratic political life and that one of the benefits of youth activism is the ability to raise confrontational issues from a critical perspective.
Jacob, another Portland youth activist, wrote his English paper on direct action, his photo essay on local Portland activism, and created a zine devoted entirely to the issues of environmental destruction and the negative effects of advertising and media. He noted his teachers’ reactions:
My teachers get sick of me sometimes. They’re always telling me ‘stop trying to make this all political’. And I am like ‘how is it not political?’ Especially since this is a place of education. This is our school. I guess a lot of people are just closed-minded to realize it’s all political … and to say school is not a part of politics is just dead wrong.
In our studies, we noticed that noninstitutionalized forms of youth political activity, such as young people’s participation in community-wide antiwar movements, was often threatening to adults. In one Portland high school, a teacher sponsor of a youth activist club was increasingly questioned by parents and the school’s administration as to whether he was encouraging his students’ antiwar activism in Portland street protests. With his job on the line, this formally supportive teacher had to insist that the school activism club cut its official ties to the radical youth antiwar activism happening in the larger community. This contributed to a rupture between school activism and community activism, a connection that student organizers had worked so hard to build. Clearly, student organizing can be dangerous endeavors not only for students but also for the adults who support them. Despite adults’ concerns over young people’s political alienation, youth activists’ testimonies reveal the extent to which this adult concern is tempered by larger panics over youth radicalism. Youth activists engaged in youth-led social justice efforts often experience adults’ attempts to channel or repress their organizing and political expression, providing a powerful rationale for distrusting and rejecting adult-organized youth councils and similar efforts. Their own vision of participation looks beyond adult-sanctioned forms of engagement and emphasizes the potential democratic value of youth-led contentious politics (McAdam et al., 2001).
Conclusion
Youth councils are highly celebrated forms of civic engagement that attempt to include young people in politics. However, their approach to political participation and inclusion is, as we have suggested in this article, quite distinct from that of young activists. Young activists’ critical perspectives on youth councils and similar state-sponsored YCE projects call attention to the fact that these forms of youth inclusion offer only one possible interpretation of democratic citizenship: participation as voice, as an elite practice, and as managed by the state. Young activists’ ideas about participation align with those put forward by feminist, anarchist, social movement, and other critical perspectives, which advocate for a much broader form of participatory democracy that emphasizes impact, collective engagement, and contentious politics. However, youth are faced with some distinct challenges when considering participation in state-sponsored forms of engagement, which other critical perspectives have not captured. More specifically, in the context of youth, we find that there are two unspoken assumptions about citizenship that potentially undermine the democratic goal of political influence.
The first of these is that youth participation is fundamentally a form of practice for future ‘real’ participation. In theory, the goals of development and of influence are presented as two equal and complementary objectives (Foster et al., 2005; Martin et al., 2007). However, the idea that youth councils are merely practice defers democratic rights for youth, suggesting that whatever happens in the domain of the youth council is actually not that significant. Whether youth councils actually impact policy is made irrelevant in this half of the frame. The pervasive notion that youth are merely ‘citizens-in-the-making’ (Gordon, 2010) rather than citizens in the present may explain why such quasi-democratic forms of participation are celebrated as ideal. In short, the developmental paradigm can enable an antidemocratic tendency within this political structure, a structure that could potentially be more democratic.
The second assumption embedded in the youth council model is that voice is influence. However, looking carefully and critically at youth councils by centering the perspectives of youth who have rejected these modes of participation, we find that many young people do not trust that when they speak, their voices will be heard. Given their experiences with marginalization and tokenism, these youth are skeptical about the extent to which their perspectives will guide adult decisions. This is not to suggest that these young people expect to have their views followed in all cases but that, from their perspective, simply speaking near politicians does not necessarily mean that their opinions will be incorporated into the policy-making process. Youth councils advise but generally give young people no real authority to make policy decisions. Youth councils do not, in the view of youth activists, accomplish the important political engagement goal of ‘making a difference’.
Youth activists’ ideas about democracy and meaningful participation can not only serve to illuminate the distinction between voice and impact but they can also tell us something about how we might improve or strengthen youth councils so that they better speak to young people’s desires for democratic participation in public life. That we encountered so many politically active youth who repeatedly rejected this form of participation underscores the need for improvements to be made to this model. Youth activists’ critical perspectives, as they are rooted in collective community movements, can serve as guideposts for these improvements. One major shift we recommend is to make sure youth councils stand in relationship to youth social movements. In this way, youth councils could more effectively represent collective youth concerns, rather than individualist perspectives of elite youth. Rather than specific adult gatekeepers, collective movements could nominate youth who would be charged with representing these movements on youth councils. And rather than taming youth dissent and narrowing youth critique, the link between youth councils and youth movements could provide an expansive entry point for multiple forms of youth engagement (connecting forms of protest to institutionalized policy making, for example). Second, youth council advocates must consider the issue of impact, of whether a council is merely an advisory body with ‘voice’, or a space of meaningful political influence. A few examples of ways to increase mechanisms of impact include opportunities to make decisions about portions of a local budget (in the tradition of participatory budgeting practices), to introduce legislation, to vote on legislation, and/or to hire or appoint candidates for particular government positions.
In our empirical research, we have encountered a vibrant underground of youth who are imagining and practicing alternative forms of YCE. Chants of ‘this is what democracy looks like’, homemade patches sporting the phrase ‘reclaim democracy, resist empire’, and criticisms of the US government on the basis of a lack of accountability all suggest that these youth are deeply committed to meaningful democracy and political participation. Their visions of democratic civic engagement for youth are quite different from what youth councils, as they are presently constructed, can offer. We return to our initial question: what is the proposed political and civic role of the empowered youth citizen? Is it to ‘practice’ the motions of electoral politics so that youth can be ready for ‘real’ political subjectivity and citizenship in adulthood? Is it to gain exposure to policy makers and learn how formal political channels work? Is it to become individual youth ‘experts’ who weigh in on youth issues? Is it to be well-socialized into the workings of young people’s local, state, and national governments? It is important to examine why so many politically active youth have rejected these roles. Their rejection is based on both institutional and everyday experiences of tokenism, adultism, social control, elitism, and schooling; on preexisting critiques of government, liberalism, and capitalism; and on their desires to ‘make a difference’ through collective and youth-led action. Their distrust of youth councils is born from these larger political and institutional contexts, whether or not they have had direct experiences with youth councils. For these youth, political action and actualized civic engagement is understood to be a collective youth project that aims to impact one’s community in meaningful ways. It is not simply ‘practice’ for the real thing. Through substantial revision, youth councils could also be sites for this kind of actualized YCE.
Footnotes
Funding
Jessica Taft’s research was partially supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. Hava Gordon’s research was partially supported by a University of Oregon Dissertation Grant.