Affiliation:
1. Institute of International Legal Studies, Rey Juan Carlos University, Calle Tulipán s/n., 28933 Móstoles, Madrid, Spain
Abstract
Young people today do not seem to be concerned about politics. They have almost no confidence in representative democracy's main actors and institutions, and consequently many of them just do not vote. The problem is that they seem to feel less connected to the society they live in than previous generations did, so some sociologists call the 18-24-year-olds the ‘self-centred generation’. In the present article we will see that young people are more concerned than it seems, but they are reluctant to get more actively involved in public matters. The reason is that, generally, the education they receive does not give them the cultural background necessary to analyse and understand the world they live in, and either they have a very low opinion of politicians or they find them totally uninteresting, a political passivity that could be fatal for our democracies.