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In Finland, each local election has almost 1 per cent of the population running for a seat in the city or municipal council, including thousands of young people. This chapter looks at first-time young candidates: where do they come from, why are they running in the election and how do they see politics in general? We find three main pathways to candidacy: through the participatory-industrial system, through various youth organizations and nongovernmental organizations, and through the hobby-collector path where politics is just one pastime activity among others. This makes young candidates quite often seasoned civic veterans. For the majority, candidacy is a continuation of a self-project, and politics is seen as problem solving instead of as a place for conflict between differing views. In contrast to other chapters in this book, parties are seen as collective structures empowering their members.
This concluding chapter returns to the conceptual turn the book has suggested by calling the analysed engagements ‘doing society’. It assesses that this contribution has enabled a holistic approach to participation and its democratic consequences. It revisits extant theorizing on representation and the cultural sense making of the relationship between the people and the polis. It suggests that in the Nordic societies, the collective action schema, and along with it the key characteristics of the Finnish political culture, are going through a major shift from an organization-focused culture to one built around individuals. The chapter summarizes the cultures of doing society emerging from youth engagements as techno-rationalist problem solving; finding a place for the individual and individualist problem-solving by the collective as an instrument. These three analytical densifications show the effect of an individualized yet traditionally collectivist cultural value base from which the young people were doing society. The chapter ends by dismantling common ‘myths’ about the youth: according to this research, there was nothing apathetic about them; participatory democracy had the ills it has been accused of, but also provided many invaluable experiences; and, finally, collectivism is coloured by cultural tools of individualism even in situations that seem the most obviously driven by collectivism, such as in the climate movement.
This chapter discusses how underprivileged youth ‘do society’. Building on ethnographic work among stigmatized youth, we show how the youth experience lack of recognition as the main characteristic and problem of society. We show, first, how institutional politics and other conventional means of influence was not the go-to strategy for most of our informants. Instead, we identify three ways in which the youth navigate unrecognition: (1) self-transformation – changing oneself into ‘a respectable citizen’; (2) opting out – flipping the finger to ‘the system’; and (3) subversion – critiquing the valuation schemes of society. We argue that all strategies operate with individualistic tools of public action, and instead of collective mobilization, the politically active youth adopted individualistic means of activism to achieve their goals for being recognized as valuable.
Youth participation in institutional decision-making processes has become increasingly common since the turn of the century. The underlying idea is to foster young people to become active citizens and to give them a voice in political decision making.
This chapter is based on multisited participant observation of youth participation processes in the greater Helsinki region. It distinguishes between common youth participation procedures and the theoretical ideals of participatory democracy. Moreover, it underlines the variety of interests, desires and styles of doing society expressed by the participants, and the mismatch between these aspirations and existing institutional arrangements.
This introductory chapter presents the book’s theoretical foundations by introducing the concept of doing society, a conceptual innovation that draws on cultural sociology and pragmatist theorizing, notably building on civic imagination, group styles and regimes of engagement. Doing society enables a more holistic analysis of forms of participation, ranging from fleeting interactions to actively building political careers, departing from the actors’ understanding of the political and focusing on their action and engagements. Furthermore, the chapter opens up three contextual perspectives in which the book is situated. The first perspective suggests a ‘zeitgeist’-oriented contribution to the social scientific debate about the current dynamics of individualism and collectivism. The second perspective addresses the societal context of the research on which the book is based: the historical background and current realities of participation by using individualistic cultural tools in the Nordic countries and in particular Finland. The third contextual perspective is that of youth studies and young people’s specific position as the actors forging the future of democracy by using individualistic cultural tools. Finally, the chapter presents the contents of the book.
Anonymous online groups such as imageboards are places where young people come together to create peculiar subcultures which may spread far and wide, contributing to imagining society and culture anew. But such spaces also act as seedbeds for fringe ideologies, harassment and even violence. Building on a mixed-methods study of Ylilauta together with ethnographic participant observation, this chapter sheds light on how cultural practices such as transgressive and hateful speech may act to build bonds within a subcultural community, but also draw strict boundaries to outside enemies. Online spaces such as this one may simultaneously produce a large group with its distinct style, while containing several fleeting ad hoc subgroups, as participation in them is open, porous and amorphous. We pay special attention to how so-called affordances such as technologically and culturally enforced anonymity should be understood to work in terms of building of commonality online.
Based on interviews and fieldwork among climate activists principally from the Extinction Rebellion Finland, this chapter shows how the cultural tools of individualism work in a social movement with all the seemingly traditional features of collective action. While demonstrations and civil disobedience are often organized collectively, and their aftermath is dealt with debriefing in affinity groups, the engagements of the activists turn out to be extremely individualistic. Activists portray themselves as reluctant both to call themselves activists, and to pursue the actions any longer than strictly necessary, and these features connect to their burdensome feeling of being individually responsible not only for the actions they take, but also for the movement’s success, and ultimately for the fate of the planet. Political protest, or the collective movement formed to pursue it, has no intrinsic value, but only serves the purpose of influencing climate politics in the most efficient ways possible. The chapter concludes that the individualistic and efficiency-bound culture of doing society replaces prefiguration and, overall, results in a solitary and burnout-prone activist experience for the youth.
This chapter, based on an ethnographic study of an urban neighbourhood movement organizing an annual street party, asks what collective civic action looks like in the age of individualism. The activists eschewed traditional organizational forms of Finnish civil society in favour of a more open social movement and participation defined by personalism and individual creativity, and emphasized doing instead of belonging as the defining feature of the movement. This required the upkeep of a commitment culture in order to get activists to take responsibilities of their ‘solo gigs’ within the larger movement. The chapter delves deeper into the several meanings of “individualism” and argues that 1) individualism can manifest in several ways, and therefore 2) increasing individualism, or personalism, within collective structures does not necessarily mean an increasing pursuit of self-interest but that 3) it does geopardize the formation and up-keep of a political coalition.
This chapter analyses the initiatives submitted to Youthideas.fi, an e-democracy service aimed at young people developed in cooperation between a youth information nongovernmental organization and several governmental actors. A dataset of over 450 ideas submitted to the service was analysed using a theoretical framework highlighting the justifications, grammars of commonality and civic imaginations expressed in the initiatives. We found that the majority of the ideas were technical solutions to everyday problems and that the argumentation used was primarily based on private interests. We use these results to argue that the Youthideas.fi service promotes a techno-rationalist and problem-based conception of democracy. While this reflects a typical style of argumentation found in Finnish political culture, we suggest that more deliberative means of participation could have more far-reaching positive consequences for democratic development.
How do young people participate in democratic societies? This book introduces the concept of ‘doing society’ as a new theory of political action. Focused on Finnish youth, it innovatively blends cutting-edge empirical research with agenda-setting theoretical development. Redefining political action, the authors expand beyond traditional public-sphere, scaling from formal to informal and unconventional modes of engaging.
The book captures diverse engagement from memes to social movements, from participatory budgeting to street parties and from sleek politicians to detached people in the margins. In doing so, it provides a holistic view of the ways in which young people participate (or do not participate) in society, and their role in cultural change.
