Project: Tomorrow’s Leaders – Party Youth Organizations and Democracy

 

Funded in part by Ann-Cathrine Jungar, Södertörn University, School of Social Sciences, Sweden.

The project conducts in-depth comparative research on the youth sections of Freiheitliche Partei Österreich (FPÖ) and investigate four main overarching questions: (1) How are the youth sections of the five parties organized? (2) Why do young people join? (3) What activities are members engaged in and how are they socialized? (4) Is a transnational populist radical right elite emerging? In this context, a collaboration with scholars of the Hannah Arendt Institute for the Research on Totalitarianism (TU Dresden) is ongoing whereby an innovative interview format was used to ascertain the views of democracy by radical party youth leaders in Germany and Austria.

In the context of this conceptual focus, department researchers organized and fielded also a survey of party youth leaders  of Conservative and Social Democratic Parties in Austria and Germany as part of a multinational consortium including teams from Australia, North America and various European countries. While the surveys are still ongoing in 2022, first results “Party Youth in Austria and Germany” were presented at the ECPR general conference in 2021 (see the attached PDF of the presentation).