BECOMING A CITIZEN: Analysing the social representations of citizenship in youth¹

In recent years, talking about citizenship seems to be a fashionable topic in social science. Although the danger of emptying the concept itself of all content by attempting to apply it to too broad a range of issues is evident, its relevance and popularity have a lot to do with the need to understand how people become integrated into their political communities. The processes of sociopolitical integration are becoming increasingly complex as the world we live in changes faster and faster, and in ways that are often unpredictable. All these factors explain why the institution of citizenship is subjected to an almost continuous redefinition, and why its contents, limits, and actors are the object of debate among specialists, technicians, and politicians. All of them try to diagnose the new challenges that our European societies have to face and to find the most adequate responses for breaking the circle of lack of confidence, disaffection, and disinterest in public affairs that seems to grip democracies at the turn of the century.

In this uncertain environment, there is no doubt that reference to youth and its presence in the public sphere is one of the most important subjects, given the strategic position young people hold in the processes of building citizenship (Bynner et al.1997). The discussion about the incorporation of new generations as full members of society is a key issue for achieving a detailed knowledge of the genesis, access, and practices of citizenship. Yet in order for this debate to be fruitful, we believe that citizenship among youth must be approached, as in this paper, from an empirical and sociological perspective, even if these two adjectives are rather unusual in this field of research. First, however, we should clarify certain issues.

In the first place, we must go beyond the stage of mere normative formulations about the young person who readies him/herself to be a good citizen and address the empirical analysis of young people's position in society. We have to consider their experiences of what being a citizen means, as well as the social, economic, and cultural conditions in which their lives develop. Secondly, we must bring the sociopolitical component of citizenship back to its central position. In youth studies, citizenship too often appears just as a synonym of adulthood, stripped of any reference to the world of political meanings. From our point of view, if we understand citizenship as agency (Lister 2003), being a citizen involves enjoying several rights and being able to play a leading role in the social and political processes of the community. Acting as a citizen involves becoming an actor in the public sphere.

The main argument of the paper builds on the idea expressed by Jones and Gaventa (2002: 13) according to which ‘the way in which people understand themselves as citizens is likely to have a significant impact on their rights and obligations and on whether they participate, in what form and why’. Following this statement, we propose an analytical framework for an empirical analysis of the discourses, images, and representations of what being a citizen means for young people today.

The article is divided into four sections. In the first one, we will approach the relationship between youth and citizenship as it has been debated in recent years, and we will show its importance for a better comprehension both of youth transitions and the characteristics of civic life. We will attempt to justify the need to go beyond the traditional identification of the status of citizen with that of the socially autonomous adult. As an alternative, we will defend a broader concept of what it means to become a citizen. Our position is based on an empirical reformulation of the concept of citizenship, which will be developed in the second section. We will put forward the need to launch an applied sociology of citizenship based on two principles: a dynamic and relational idea of citizenship and the acknowledgement of its multidimensional nature. In the third section, we will propose an analytical scheme for studying social representations of citizenship among young people. This analytical framework has been built on the analysis of young people's life experiences, using recent qualitative research on Spanish youngsters as a starting point. Our analytical scheme is structured along two main axes: belonging and involvement. The contents of the discourses and social representations of young people are organized along these two dimensions. Finally, the contribution of our proposals to the subject of youth-citizenship will be briefly reviewed.

The emphasis on the relationship between citizenship and youth is quite a recent perspective in this field of research, which is strongly linked to the new circumstances in which young people's lives have developed during the last decade. Researchers, especially in European have become increasingly interested in approaching young people's lives from new analytical points of view that allow a better comprehension of situations that turn more and more complex (Bynner et al.1997). Until recently, both terms seemed to have little in common, because traditionally it was thought that the condition of citizen could only be attributed to the socially independent adult. As Marshall (1950: 24) stated, the citizen par excellence was the adult male. From this traditional perspective, young people hold a number of civic rights but, lacking the independence and autonomy necessary to fully integrate themselves into the community, they do not enjoy the status of full members, of citizens in the strict sense. At the most, it could be said, following Jones and Wallace (1992), that they possess a citizenship by proxy that is determined by the relationship they maintain with the citizens par excellence. Yet recent developments in citizenship theory that insist on the need of taking into account new civic rights and new subjects of citizenship (Kymlicka and Norman 1994; Turner 2001) and recognize the unfitness of traditional conceptions for the deep social transformations occurred in recent years have led many European specialists to inquire into the relationship between youth and the social construction of citizenship.

There are several reasons that help to explain the rise of this new approach to the study of the incorporation of young people into adult life, as well as the main lines along which research is developing. In the first place, the new social and economic circumstances of the 1990s, which have very directly influenced the lives of young people in advanced industrial societies, require a different perspective in order to explain how the new generations enter into adulthood. The paths that lead from childhood to adulthood have multiplied and become exceedingly complicated; they have come to be increasingly unpredictable, even to the point of involving a high risk of social exclusion for certain groups of young people (Bynner and Silbereisen 2000). Just as postmodern discourse holds, we are facing an individualization and privatization of the problems of youth (Wallace and Kovatcheva 1998) that prevents us from continuing to speak about typical trajectories determined by class origins or cultural capital (Evans and Furlong 1997). We therefore need to carry out a comprehensive analysis of the circumstances in which the lives of young people develop, considering the interrelationship among institutional processes, the construction of identities, and social practices.

Secondly, the meanings of age-linked status are now much more ambiguous in European countries. They have blurred as the uncertainty and complexity that surround youth transitions have increased. Until a few years ago, adulthood in the European context was a pretty well-defined social category, with clear social, economic, and political meanings. However, the circumstances that used to make evident the achievement of adulthood have become ambiguous and reversible. Leaving home, quitting school, or getting married are, in many cases, temporary experiences that complicate any attempt to define precisely the ‘markers’ of adulthood (Wyn and White 1997). The arrival point of youth, understood as a transition, is becoming more and more problematic. Although important differences in the tempo of transition among European countries still persist, we can identify unceasing back and forth movements from one position to the other, and we are confronted by the proliferation of intermediate situations of semi-dependence and semi-autonomy. The most immediate consequence of these phenomena is that the adult status is no longer useful for analysing the social incorporation of young people.

Finally, the lengthening of the transition period brings about the social visibility of youth and elements of identification that create a certain kind of identity. Thus, youth ceases to be a mere transitional stage defined more by absence than by presence (no work, no home, no partner), and turns into ‘a web of communications that can be extended beyond adulthood’ (Feixa 1998: 54). While young people are in the midst of their complex transits towards economic independence and social autonomy, they are also carrying out important actions in the public sphere: they consume, protest, express solidarity, establish networks of social interaction, obtain institutional acknowledgement, etc. It is necessary therefore to analyse the processes through which young people become citizens: the ways in which they change from being the target of the State's protective action to appearing as active holders of rights and duties, endowed with the capacity to take part in public community affairs.

The above reasons amply justify the expectations that this line of research has created among specialists in youth studies, as well as among those who approach the subject from related fields. There is no doubt that the issue agenda to be dealt with defines a highly relevant scientific and political field (Coles 1995).² Aside from their evident interest, these approaches also imply some important problems. The most relevant, in our opinion, is the slight attention paid to the second term of the youth-citizenship binomial. Without going into the theoretical discussions that oppose liberals to communitarians or republicans, talking about youth and citizenship forces us to consider certain basic issues: the different collective meanings of citizenship, the current images of citizenship, and the relevance given to its different components (civil, social and political). However, youth studies frequently refer to citizenship only as a metaphor for the complex and unclear incorporation of young people into the world of adults. Thus, they fail to analyse the ways in which young people interpret the rights and responsibilities connected with the status of citizenship or by which they express their membership in the community. In other words, research on youth and citizenship has not inquired sufficiently into what being a citizen means in European societies.

A direct consequence of these views is that hardly any difference is established between becoming an adult and becoming a citizen, two terms that are implicitly or explicitly made to be equivalent, in spite of the distance that separates both processes today (Hall et al.1998: 310–11). Part of this confusion could be solved if, despite recognizing the importance of civic rights, we place our emphasis on the substantive dimension of citizenship. That is, if we stress the way in which young people develop and put into practice these rights and obligations. From this perspective, citizenship is constructed socially through concrete experiences and practices in public spaces. Young people become citizens not when they are acknowledged to be adults, but when they make themselves present in the public sphere, when they make use of the rights they are acquiring, and when they demand to participate in collective decision-making, in spite of the social and institutional bonds that structure their lives during this transitional phase.

The question that comes up immediately is: how can young people be citizens without being independent? The traditional concept of citizen was built upon the notion of autonomy, basically understood as economic independence. As a result, this kind of independence, closely linked to access to the labour market, became the necessary prerequisite for domestic and housing transitions; that is, for youth emancipation. This understanding of young people's material independence as the basic key for full access to citizenship was one of the most frequently repeated ideas during the first stages of research on citizenship and youth. In their pioneering study, on several occasions Jones and Wallace (1992) pointed out that the full participation of young people in society basically depends on their achieving economic independence.

Circumstances have changed noticeably in recent decades. The traditional paths of access to economic independence have become complicated. The obstacles to accessing the labour market (such as unemployment or precarious jobs), the extension of the period of formal education, or the difficulties involved in leaving the paternal/maternal home inevitably lengthen the dependence of young people on their family. In only four ye ars (1997–2001) the family's share in the income of EU young people, aged 15–24, has risen from 45 to 55%. (Schizzerotto and Gasperoni 2001).³ This context of growing dependence in which European youth lives today has important social consequences in areas such as marriage and fertility rates and family models. Additionally, it contributes to substantiate the image of youth as a period of prolonged ‘quasi-citizenship’ in which young people are asked to be active and take on civic responsibilities, but are not offered the socioeconomic conditions necessary for the effective exercise of their rights and their active participation in the public sphere (Morán and Benedicto 2000, 2003a).

Nevertheless, there appear a number of factors that obscure the consideration of economic independence as the indispensable key to the civic life of the young when analysing in detail the current situation of young people in European societies. On one hand, economic dependence on the family coexists with obvious forms of social and cultural autonomy (lifestyles, norms of social behaviour, personal relationships, consumption habits, etc.). Consequently, some authors speak of a period of ambiguous dependency (Ahier and Moore 1999). On the other hand, it is increasingly evident that work is no longer the privileged locus where the identity of European youth is constituted and developed. It seems to have been replaced by involvement in leisure and consumer activities, which have become central elements for developing feelings of belonging (France 1998). Additionally, we should not lose sight of the fact that, among certain groups of young people, the lack of work and family responsibilities, together with their greater dedication to training activities, favours their active involvement in community affairs to an even greater degree than that of some adults who tend to restrict themselves to the sphere of their private affairs.

Thus, the difficulties involved in obtaining the necessary economic resources for emancipation constitute, undoubtedly, a significant structural conditioning to young people's access to citizenship. Yet at the same time, there are other relational dimensions that endow them with a kind of social autonomy, previously non-existent. The building of personal autonomy in situations of dependence or semi-dependence has become one of the defining features of the structural transformation of youth. (Bontempi 2004).

Becoming a citizen is, therefore, more than the mere formal acknowledgement of rights and duties, and cannot be simply identified with social integration. Being a citizen is a complex phenomenon in which institutional processes, cultural practices, and political actions are intertwined. In this sense, we will have to rethink the conception of citizenship, stressing its dynamic, multidimensional character, and transferring emphasis on economic independence to other components related to the construction of personal autonomy, such as capacities, competences, and feelings of belonging and participation. In this way, the focus of analysis is displaced towards the acquisition of these resources and the necessary conditions for their activation, in order to bring about different forms of civic participation.

One of the most prominent aspects in the current debate on citizenship is the need to review traditional formulae in order to comprehend the profound social changes taking place in contemporary societies. The uncertain and complex consequences of globalisation processes are profoundly changing the relationship of individuals with their political community and their role in the development of social and political processes. Phenomena such as the increase in migrations, the alterations in the structure of social inequalities, and the rise of new supranational political formulae like the European Union are seriously undermining the classic principles upon which the old concepts of citizen and citizenship were established. Simultaneously, the difficulties of the classic conception of citizenship in accounting for the different ways in which specific social groups, such as young people, have access to and exercise the status of citizenship are increasingly obvious.

Various branches of social sciences have given disparate answers to these challenges, which are difficult to summarize. With a critical re-reading of T.H. Marshall's work (1950) as a starting point, interesting debates on the processes of restructuring citizenship have taken place (Somers 1993; Kymlicka 1995; Walzer 1997; Siim 2000; Turner 1990, 2001; Crouch et al.2001). To these we must add the discussions on the construction of a European citizenship. However, and to the detriment of empirical research, in most cases theoretical speculation and a normative bias still predominate.

Undoubtedly, the difficulty in operationalizing the concept of citizenship has a lot to do with this fact, given its broadness, ambiguity, and strong ideological bias Nevertheless, it should not prevent us from paying more attention to the social dynamics of citizenship, the analysis of how citizenship works in certain historical contexts, and the characteristics (institutional, cultural and political) that citizenship acquires in specific social groups. A great deal of discussion has been carried out on civic rights and responsibilities, but almost exclusively from a generic point of view, as if we were dealing with abstract citizens. In contrast, there are few empirical analyses on the meaning that citizenship bears for specific citizens. Hall and Williamson allude to this dimension as ‘lived citizenship’: ‘the meaning that citizenship actually has in people's lives and the ways in which people's social and cultural backgrounds and material circumstances affect their lives as citizens’ (1999: 2). From this perspective, it is especially interesting to analyse empirically how citizenship operates in youth, insofar as it is a social group with an evident civic deficit,⁴ and whose citizenship identities, spaces, and practices are subjected to an accelerated rate of change.

Along this line of analysis, our proposal of an empirical reformulation of citizenship is based on two fundamental elements. In the first place, a dynamic and relational notion of citizenship in which social practices are placed at the core of the argument. Instead of thinking about citizenship as an individual status, defined by the state's attribution of diverse rights and the ambiguous acknowledgement of certain responsibilities acquired once and for all, it must be understood as a process whose contents and meanings change in the course of the life trajectories of individuals, among different social groups, and according to specific historical contexts. In addition, these contents and meanings are defined by means of social, institutional and individual practices carried out in the public sphere.⁵ Margaret Somers concisely sums up this notion of citizenship: ‘… I propose that citizenship be defined as an “instituted process” (Polanyi, 1957), i.e., citizenship is a set of institutionally embedded social practices. These practices are contingent upon and constituted by networks of relationships and political idioms that stress membership and universal rights and duties in a national community. Rather than a body of rights granted “ready-made” by the state and attached to individual persons, however, citizenship rights are only one potential outcome of a configuration of national membership rules’ (Somers 1993: 589).

The second principle is the recognition of the multidimensionality of citizenship, both as a theoretical notion and as an object of empirical research. Citizenship is made up of several components, the specific interrelation of which defines its social dynamics within a particular context or group. Therefore, recognizing the diversity of levels of analysis at which it can be studied implies building citizenship as an object of sociological analysis. Much of the literature on the subject refers to three constituent elements (García and Lukes 1999; Kiviniemi 1999). First of all, a formal or institutional level composed of the framework of rights and duties through which the relationship of citizenship is expressed normatively and institutionally. Questions relating to nationality, equality, and justice are most relevant at this primary level. Secondly, a cultural or ideological level that refers to the complex relationships of belonging and involvement from which citizen identities are formed. Finally, a strictly societal level in which sociopolitical, governmental, and citizen practices are developed andset within the institutional framework and citizen cultures. This is the field where the practices of citizenship take place.

The pinpointing of these essential elements makes it possible to analyse the processes of their mutual influence, adjustment, clash, and conflict. Consequently, if we reintroduce the diachronic dimension into our argument, we can put forward some hypotheses on the consequences of distinct rates of change for each of these elements. Some of the problems observed in several European countries when analysing young people's access to citizenship could be better understood by taking into account the disparity, and even the contradiction, among the evolution of the legal and institutional frameworks, young people's civic identities, and the practices carried out in the public sphere.

Special attention will be paid in this paper to the cultural and ideological aspects of citizenship. As previously stated, we are focusing on the construction of analytic tools for studying how young people build their civic identities. Additionally, we are bearing in mind that cultural elements play a fundamental role in the shaping of sociopolitical phenomena and define the range of possibilities within which the actors’ interpretations, discourses, and behaviours occur. They form the grammar of political action (Cefaï 2001).

More than two decades have past since several authors made an announcement about ‘bringing the culture back in’ to sociopolitical analysis (Wuthnow 1984; Alexander 1989; Swidler 1986; Welch 1993). It seems now to be widely acknowledged that, to put it briefly, cultural factors contribute decisively to many aspects to the configuration of civic life: i.e., the creation of collective identities, the development of civic action, and the design and functioning of institutional systems. Nevertheless, the building of citizen identities constitutes the field where the cultural dimension becomes more relevant.

Consequently, the founding character of the cultural dimension in the study of citizenship constitutes the theoretical basis of our analytical framework. From this starting point, the framework we now present seeks to identify and discuss the fundamental dimensions of the social representations of citizenship. It must not be forgotten that our ultimate purpose is to design a research tool to make possible the analysis of the discourses, images and attitudes concerning what it means to be a citizen for today's young people. The empirical basis of this analytic scheme is the result of qualitative research on citizenship conceptions among Spanish youth.⁶ The techniques used included focus groups and in-depth interviews carried out with young people of different socio-cultural statuses and diverse life circumstances. The predominant meanings of citizenship among Spanish youth do not differ greatly from the ones shown by research in other European countries, especially the one carried out by Ruth Lister with British young people (Lister et al. 2003; Smith et al. 2005). Nevertheless, what is interesting to us is not the concrete results of Spanish youth, but the analytical concepts that may be constructed on the basis of the data collected. These concepts serve as the foundation for the analytical scheme of the social representations of citizenship among youth that will be developed in the following pages.

The conceptual and historical complexity of citizenship makes it difficult to agree on its characteristic components. Taking J. Leca's proposal (1990) about the cultural foundations of modern citizenship as our starting point, we constructed our analytical framework along two main axes. The specific contents, images, and concepts that shape the different visions of citizenship present in a particular social group (in our case, young people) are arranged along these axes. These two axes are belonging and involvement. For each one, we will discuss the fundamental components of social representations and propose different categorizations of these variables in order to define the basic features of the conceptions of citizenship that can be identified empirically.

Being a citizen implies, basically, being part of a specific political community, a fact that is made explicit in a specific kind of collective identity: the citizen identity. This identity is certainly complex, with universalistic meanings coexisting with references to memberships derived from ‘primary links’ (family, tribe, generation, religion, gender, etc.). In order to comprehend this kind of identity we must distinguish between two fundamental questions: How does one become part of the community? and What kind of community does one form part of?

As to the first question, it is evident that belonging to a group means being acknowledged by others as a member and feeling oneself included in it. Therefore, the answer to our first question includes objective and subjective dimensions. From an objective point of view, we must consider the mechanisms by which the individual becomes a member of the community. In contrast to other collective identities in which belonging is based on a series of attributes that individuals endow with meaning, modern citizenship expresses membership collectively through the acknowledgement (by oneself and by others) of rights and duties that are developed institutionally. Although from this formal perspective the enjoyment of rights and duties is associated with the legal acknowledgement of the condition of being a citizen, current reflection on citizenship has laid emphasis on the structural barriers that often make it difficult for citizens to have access to and exercise these rights (Siim 2000; Sassen 2003).

This latter situation is especially important in the case of young people (Jones and Wallace 1992) and constitutes one of the fundamental elements in the configuration of their feelings of belonging. The meanings young people confer to civic rights and responsibilities are debated and negotiated on the basis of their life experiences, the social factors that structure their access to public life, and the processes of inclusion and exclusion in which they are involved. These meanings will help to explain the peculiar combination that, in each case, young people establish between rights and responsibilities.⁷

Available research points to a close relationship between the conception that citizens have of their rights and duties and the cultural and political context of their daily lives (Conover et al. 1991). One of the most outstanding results of our own research on Spanish youth is the absolute preeminence of the language of rights, whereas the language of duties is only used sporadically and in a limited way (Morán and Benedicto 2003b). On the contrary, in a similar study on British youth, Lister et al. (2003): 247) pointed out that ‘the young people we interviewed found it markedly more difficult to identify their rights than they did their responsibilities’. The different political contexts of Spain and Great Britain, along with their disparate cultural traditions, could explain relatively well the opposed views that the young people of the two countries hold of the civic rights-duties binomial⁸.

Along with the objective aspects of belonging, we must also keep in mind the subjective aspects. In order to belong to the community, one also has to feel oneself to be a member of it. The existence of a common ‘us’ that goes beyond the differences that distinguish one group from another and gives meaning to belonging must be admitted. Traditionally, this ‘citizen us’ has been understood in national terms, resting on the identification with a common history and culture. However, in addition to national identity, the salience of other ways of belonging is increasingly evident for understanding youth civic identities. When referring to young people, these ways of belongings are multiple and complex. For example, according to many specialists, leisure time and consumer practices have become the main identity reference for constructing feelings of collective belonging among many European young people today (France 1998; Vinken 2004). Nevertheless, other young people, such as many young Moslems in French and British inner cities (to give two well-known examples), seem to build their citizen identity primarily on ethnic or religious identification (Tietze 2002; Hussain and Begguley 2005). Additionally, on many other occasions, uncertainty and ambiguity prevail when it comes to specifying clear feelings of belonging beyond a vague identification with a set of traditions and symbols considered characteristic of the adult world.⁹

The second element to consider when analysing citizen identities is the type of community in which the citizen is and/or feels included. Aside from the community institutional characteristics, it is important to study the criteria that citizens use to define it. Two criteria should be considered. In the first place, the spatial framework in which the community is located and within which citizen identity is understood. Belonging to a specific community implies the existence of certain reference ‘maps’ the individual uses to place it within definite spatial coordinates and to give meaning to his/her membership. Of course, these spatial frameworks vary according to the type of society and are transformed in the course of their historical evolution. In short, they do not have a monolithic character. In our analysis of focus groups with young Spanish people, three broad categories about civic community can be distinguished.

Above all, there is a local or particular membership in which identity is fundamentally defined with reference to the spaces in which primary or local groups (family, peer group, ethnic group, religious group, etc.) are located. Local communities, adscriptive groups, and interpersonal relationship networks occupy a central position in this kind of representation. In the second place, we have to consider membership in a socially defined political community where identity presupposes the existence of some kind of collectivity that is more inclusive than the primary groups. The most widely extended form of this kind of representation is the nation-state, a fact that explains the diffuse tendency to identify citizenship with nationality. Finally, there is a third kind of spatial framework that could be called global or supranational. In this case, identity is based on some form of representation of the existence of a supranational or transnational community with inclusive capacity. The range of possibilities is wide: from membership in supra-state entities such as the European Union to different proposals about a ‘world or cosmopolitan citizenship’ based on a radical conception of human rights (Bottomore 1992; Held 1995).

On many occasions people do not perceive these three identity spaces in an exclusive way, but assume rather naturally the multiplicity of identity references. Nevertheless, for the majority of young people, the local dimension possesses special significance. Just as our research confirmed, the space shared with others in the family, at school and, above all, with friends, makes up the tangible referent of membership throughout a good part of youth. Thus, the neighbourhood, the street, and the places for leisure activities constitute the main scenarios where young people form the ir identities (Hall et al.1999). As the young person takes on adult responsibilities, this tangible referent becomes diluted in favour of spaces that are more distant from life experiences and have a greater symbolic charge. Therefore, the challenge of the European project includes the construction of a shared space to be converted into a tangible referent of belonging for youth identities.

In addition to the spatial framework, individuals define the community of which they feel members by means of a certain logic of identification. Different forms of conceiving the links of solidarity that unite citizens come up in the discourses employed by individuals and groups when discussing their civic memberships. These conceptions of social solidarity reveal different views on the nature of the community to which one belongs.¹⁰ The discourse of the young people we worked with exhibited the following kinds of logic of identification.

First of all, traditional identification. In this case, membership is expressed with the language, values, and symbols that depict the community as something ‘natural’ or inevitable. The community arises either from tradition or from the insertion into informal networks of interpersonal relationships. Secondly, there is an egalitarian identification. In this case, the community of membership is represented in terms that are radically opposed to those of the first type. In egalitarian discourses, membership is defined by values of equality among members and by a certain degree of ‘self-government’ of the membership. The third category is individualistic identification. Individuals and groups establish their links of membership according to a logic of competence where frequent estimations of cost and benefit take place. Within this logic of identification, the links of solidarity among citizens are weak and, occasionally, non-existent. The final category is state identification. This may be the type of citizen identity that is closest to a traditional conception of politics. Here, community membership is explained and legitimated ‘from above’, through the actions of state or quasi-state organisms that define the nature, spheres and practices of citizenship. Spanish youngters opt for one logic of identification or another depending on the type of transition in which they are immersed.

The second axis of our analytical framework, involvement, is an indispensable element of the idea of citizenship and, more specifically, of democratic citizenship. Although the reality of our democratic life may at times cast doubt on this, acknowledging someone's citizen status implies offering him/her the possibility of participating in the affairs that affect the community, to the point of turning this possibility into a civic duty.

Since we intend to study the cultural dimensions of citizenship, we are less interested in the specific activities developed or in the channels through which involvement is carried out, than in the meaning the protagonists attribute to involvement. Consequently, the particular features of youth political participation and the structural obstacles that block it should not be confused with young people's representations of this participation. Two aspects should be considered in these representations: the necessary competences for involvement and the nature of the involvement.

In order for involvement in the public sphere to be an effective reality, a ‘citizenship conscious of itself’ is needed, as Jean Leca (1990) maintains. Its three main components are: (a) a belief in the intelligibility of the political world; (b) empathy, that is, the capacity to put oneself in the place of others in order to understand their interests and justifications; and (c) civility, or the acknowledgement of a common adhesion and a responsibility toward social order, despite diversity. The participants must also be acquainted with the rules and mechanisms of functioning of the public sphere in order to understand the implications of their own and others’ behaviour; and they must have the necessary capacities to carry out actions in a terrain that transcends the private sphere. To summarize, citizens must possess the indispensable resources to consider themselves as actors and to present and legitimize themselves as such.

However, the definition of these resources depends on multiple social, cultural, and historical factors. Thus, for example, the specific way in which each social group understands its own identity as a member of the political community will cause it to regard some competences more important than others. Similarly, the impact of increasing political disaffection and the emergence of new political spaces and actors in contemporary public life require a revision of the traditional conception of civic competence that reduces it to a mere individual feeling. What is important is not to lose sight of the fact that, by defining the resources that make civic involvement possible, a certain image of the citizen and of the commitment that links him/her to the community is constructed.In their previously quoted research, Lister et al. state that a caring attitude towards others and an active participation in the community are clearly attributes that the majority of young people identify with the ideal of a good citizen (Lister et al. 2003: 244; Smith et al. 2005). Therefore, for these British youngsters civic competence is not the belief that an influence can be exerted in political affairs, as stated by Almond and Verba (1963), but rather doing something on behalf of others and contributing to the community through constructive participation.

What these resources and competences for involvement are, what relative importance they are given, how they are acquired, and what social requisites are necessary to activate them are some of the aspects to be investigated in the subject's discourses. In the case of young people, these issues are central to an understanding of their representations of citizenship, insofar as the social processes that structure youth transitions today are transforming their conceptions of competent citizenship and the mechanisms for achieving it.¹¹

The second component to be studied is the nature of civic involvement, its characteristics, and the importance attributed to it. In this case, the most relevant element, and the one that best discriminates among the different conceptions of citizenship, is the degree of presence and protagonism citizens are granted in public affairs. This is, doubtless, an issue in which normative discourses have great repercussions, so that it will be necessary to analyse them in each specific case. However, we must enter into the terrain of concrete practices while attending to the types of reasoning used to justify them and to the position attributed to the subjects in the development of their citizen practices.

We have identified three different conceptions of civic involvement in the discourse of young people. In the first place, we have disengagement. In this case, involvement is defined negatively, that is, in terms of the distance between the citizen and the community. Here, the most important issue will be to analyse how this distance is justified. In a way, disengagement is a synonym of exclusion or marginalization – voluntary or not – from civic life. Secondly, there is conformity. It is expressed by the observance of community norms that are not even questioned, so that, even though positive feelings of involvement exist, they will not give rise to claims of new rights, or allow citizens to imagine new ways of participation beyond the conventional ones. Finally, we have activism. In this conception, subjects depict themselves as active members or, at least, as potential participants in the community with the possibility of claiming new rights.

Given the complex and multiform nature of civic involvement, the discourses tend to vary according to the type of sphere or the kind of involvement that we are referring to. Therefore, one of the most frequent conclusions in current research on youth political participation is, precisely, the need to overcome hurried statements on the apathy or disinterest of new generations, in favour of a much more complex conception that takes into account how young people conceive of and experience ‘the political’ (O'Toole et al.2003). Only by doing so, will it be possible to explain why many young people feel excluded from the public sphere when referring to institutional politics, while they maintain positions closer to activism when alluding to protest movements or to issues they think affect their lives directly. This apparent contradiction constitutes one of the characteristic features of young people's civic experience and is a key element for understanding their conceptions of citizenship (Bettin 2001).

We have tried in this article to take an in-depth look at the relationship between youth and citizenship, paying specific attention to the second issue, contrary to the predominant trend of previous research. Our point is that, in order to comprehend the position occupied by young people in our European societies and to explain their integration processes into the social and political community, it is necessary to analyse thoroughly what being a citizen means in contemporary societies and how young people become citizens through a process closely related to their transitions to adulthood.

The empirical reformulation of the concept of citizenship that stresses its dynamic and multidimensional character allows us to go beyond the debate about whether at present young people are or are not true citizens, given the growing difficulties for their emancipation. The fundamental issue is not achieving the independence that supposedly defines adulthood, but rather acquiring the necessary competences and motivations for acting in the public sphere. Therefore, the real debate should refer to what kind of citizens young people become. This is so because these young people do not become citizens, in the sociopolitical sense employed here, only through the formal acknowledgement by the State of a set of rights, nor by overcoming the economic dependence that prevents their emancipation. Young people become citizens in progressive and complex ways. They learn to be citizens in social interactions, in contexts of experience that endow what they say and do with meaning (Smith et al. 2005: 440). They build their citizen identities through social representations of what citizenship means and involves. Consequently, in some cases it will be an active and responsible citizenship, while in others, on the contrary, it will be a passive, dependent one.

The empirical analysis of these social representations will result in a better knowledge of what the different groups of young people understand by citizenship, the way in which they understand themselves as citizens, and the meaning that citizenship has in their lives. In order to carry out this empirical analysis, the analytic scheme put forward seems particularly adequate. In each case, the more or less unstable and contradictory combination of the positions people hold regarding the different criteria of belonging and involvement will permit us to assert empirically the different conceptions of citizenship involved. In contrast to the frequent abstract classifications of ideal types of citizenship, this way of proceeding can contribute to the building of an empirical sociology of the cultural foundations of citizenship. This subject is especially interesting in the case of young people.