Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Politics of Adolescence and Democracy

IP-PAD (Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Politics of Adolescence & Democracy) aims to address a timely, pressing societal issue, namely the understanding of how young adolescent citizens process political information and how this affects their engagement with politics. Youth engagement with politics has always been crucial for the future of democracy as the adolescents of today become the voting citizens of tomorrow. Their political engagement seems even more important today as we have witnessed a decline in youth satisfaction with democracy, while at the same time the social and political challenges of climate change, misinformation, declining voter turnout, polarization and radicalization raise concerns about the future of liberal democracies in Europe. To address these aims, IP-PAD will integrate, for the first time, in a systematic, rigorous and mutually beneficial way two main areas of research: first, the extensive literature on youth political engagement from the perspective of political and social sciences; and second, the insights on the wide-ranging changes that occur in the adolescent brain, obtained from the fields of developmental psychology and neuroscience. While prolific in their own respect, these two perspectives have till now been kept separate. IP-PAD argues that a rigorous understanding of how adolescents process political information requires the integration of these two strands. IP-PAD will fill this gap by studying how the developing adolescent brain in the different sociopolitical contexts of five European countries underpins the emergence of the social, and eventually, political self. By integrating these two perspectives and in collaboration with three major European non-academic partners (European Youth Parliament, Gallup International, Counterpoint Global) IP-PAD will provide an in-depth interdisciplinary training to a young generation of social scientists in conducting open, rigorous, innovative and impactful research.