Youths party-political participation - A quantative study on factors affecting youths likelihood to be members of a political party

This thesis examines the political party membership in Swedish parties between 2003–2017. Previous research has observed a negative trend in the number of members of political parties. They have also found that there is a large underrepresentation of young members. This thesis explores which factors affects party members, if the factors have different kinds of impact on the membership for younger and older age groups, and if there are any differences in the factors that affect political membership among young members based on their ideological beliefs. The factors we chose to investigate are based on “the civic voluntarism model” (CVM) theory and economic theory. According to CVM, there are three main factors affecting political participation: socioeconomic resources, mental engagement and recruitment/mobilisation. The two first factors are examined in this thesis. To test the hypotheses of this study we use regression analysis on the data provided from the national SOM-survey. The results from the thesis shows that, for all age groups both socioeconomic resources and memtal engagement has a positive impact on political party membership. However, we observe differences in the impact of socioeconomic resources on youth and other age groups, where education and income have no effect and work has negative impact on youths’ membership. We also observe differences in the impact of socioeconomic resources on young person’s likelihood to be a member depending on if they classify themselves as right or left politically. Income has a positive impact for youths on the right, while the variable has a negative impact on youths on the left. Though many of the results are statistically significant, most of them are small and the degree of explanation low