ABSTRACT With the emergence of Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion, youth climate activism has attracted increasing attention. Climate strikes are part of a long trajectory of mobilizations for climate justice, rooted in global justice and environmental struggles. Although research on social movements has analyzed differences and continuities within these, there have been few systematic comparisons between youth climate strikes and ‘traditional’ climate justice marches. Our paper contributes to fill this gap. We focus on the framing of climate change in two different protest actions that took place in Milan, Italy, during the Pre-COP26 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2021: a climate strike by Fridays for Future, and a ‘traditional’ climate justice march by a wide coalition of actors. Relying on protest surveys and qualitative interviews, we discuss differences, similarities, and spaces for convergence among activists in these different fora, focusing on the framing of climate change, and on the meanings attached to ‘system change’.

ABSTRACT Drawing on electoral participation and social movement studies, we develop a typology of abstainers on the basis of their forms of non-electoral participation, and explore the determinants that drive belonging to each of these sub-groups. Although there is a positive correlation between electoral turnout and non-electoral participation, through applying latent class analyses and regressions we find that there is a subset of abstainers who decide not to cast a vote but take part in non-electoral political activities. These ‘alternative voicers’ are critical of the institutional system and do not feel represented by it, but they are politically involved. Based on their patterns of non-electoral participation, we propose a more nuanced typology of alternative voicers (e-activists, super-activists, and consumerists) and explore their drivers relative to other abstainers. We use data from the original LIVEWHAT survey conducted in 2015 across nine European countries ( N = 18,367).