Latent Classes of Envisioned Political Participation among Ethnic Minority and Majority Youth: The Role of Perceived Discrimination and Unfairness

Abstract

Adolescence is a crucial period for political socialization in which attitudes toward politics and political engagement develop. Yet, research examining how youth envision their future political engagement in early adolescence is limited. Against the backdrop of persistent societal inequalities and discrimination across Europe, this study examined how ethnic minority and majority youth in Germany envisioned their future political engagement, and to what extent envisioned action or inaction coincided with perceptions of discrimination and unfairness. The sample consisted of 3033 youth (in the 7th grade, Mage = 12.59, SDage = 0.67, 52% girls, 48% boys), 16.8% of which were classified as “ethnic minority” youth based on themselves or both of their parents not having been born in Germany. Using a person-centered approach (Latent Class Analysis), four latent classes of youth with qualitatively different patterns of envisioned political participation were identified: “voters” (47%), “unengaged” (26%), “engaged” (20%), and “undecided” (7%). In line with expectations, subsequent multinominal logical regression analysis showed that perceptions of systematic and/or group-based discrimination and unfairness robustly predicted membership in the engaged class over other classes, suggesting that such perceptions can promote envisioned political engagement among youth. While descriptive findings suggested that ethnic minority youth were more often unengaged and less often engaged than ethnic majority peers, multinominal logistic regression results showed that these differences were largely explained by other socio-economic factors.