Democratic citizenship in the UK exhibits problems of disengagement with politics

Democratic citizenship in the UK exhibits problems of disengagement with politics, as evidenced by lower levels of electoral turnout since 2001. Moreover, recent scepticism regarding the 'youthquake' in the 2017 general election, supports the evidence that younger citizens continue to participate at lower levels than older cohorts. The introduction of citizenship education to schools in 2002 was intended to help remedy this 'generation gap'. My thesis will be to develop a critique that political citizenship has been too narrowly focused due to a theoretical misapprehension of the essential nature of politics (agonism). My research project is therefore, at heart, an investigation into how we might increase the 'political literacy' of a 'demos' by developing the modest, and embattled, agenda of citizenship education. The critique will be investigated by means of a critical discourse analysis of the corpus of citizenship education documents in the UK, then 'triangulating' the analysis with my own interviews and focus groups