Conference Program

This presentation focuses on youth political disengagement, examined within the broader framework of a long-term research initiative on political literacy among Croatian youth. The initiative brings together a large group of Croatian social scientists and has monitored the level of political literacy among final-year secondary school students every five years since 2010 (Bagić, 2011; Kovačić & Horvat, 2016; Baketa, Bovan & Matić Bojić, 2021). The political literacy surveys provide insight into the political knowledge, as well as democratically relevant attitudes and behaviors, of a nationally representative segment of the youth population. In doing so, they offer an important perspective on the outcomes of political socialization among the current generation of the youngest voters and those who will soon become voters.

The nature of the project enables the insight into trends and changes over time. Several key concepts included in the current study were also examined in earlier survey waves conducted in the 2009/2010, 2014/2015, and 2020/2021 school years. This allows researchers to monitor developments in political orientations and engagement among final-year secondary students across more than a decade. Data collection for the most recent wave in the school year 2025/2026 is currently ongoing.

Within this broader research framework, the present paper places particular emphasis on youth political disengagement. Low political interest and limited political engagement among young people represent a significant challenge for democratic societies, both in Croatia and globally. Understanding the sources and correlates of political disengagement is therefore an important step toward better understanding of the political socialization of younger generations. In this presentation, we will focus specifically on the relationship between youth political disengagement and a range of socio-political attitudes, including levels of authoritarianism as well as gender-, sexual-, and ethnic-based prejudice.

To examine this phenomenon, a Youth Political Disengagement Scale was recently developed (Lukačin, Matić Bojić & Baketa, 2026). Preliminary validation results indicated a strong negative correlation between political disengagement and political interest, as well as moderate to strong negative correlations with various formal and informal forms of political participation. These findings suggest that the scale captures an important dimension of young people’s relationship with politics. However, a more detailed examination of the broader attitudinal and ideological correlates of political disengagement is still needed. Data from the ongoing survey of a large nationally representative sample of final-year secondary school students (N ≈ 1000) will make it possible to further test the construct validity of the scale and to explore how youth political disengagement relates to a broader set of socio-political orientations and attitudes among young people in Croatia.