Effect of protest participation and community involvement on youth’s life satisfaction and role of Transnational Social Movement Organizations (TSMO)

Abstract

Youth participation in social movements has spread globally in the last decade. The youths are engaging in diverse forms of “Do-It-Ourselves” activities to address social issues. Despite this, there remain youths who are civically apathetic. Given that Transnational Social Movement Organisations (TSMOs) have facilitated social changes in the past, they could serve as incubators for youth civic development. This postulation was based on the social capital theory: TSMOs could enrich youth’s social network, develop agency and competence in a prosocial environment. Hence, to understand how the civic participation trend has evolved since the waves of youth activism in 2011, this paper addressed these questions: How has the trends for European youths’ participation in protests and community involvement evolved from 2006 to 2018? To what extent, does youth participation in these civic activities influence life satisfaction? To what extent, does the presence of TSMOs moderate the type of youth’s civic action? Using the European Social Survey and TSMO databases, the study found an increase in youth civic engagement over time and found that community involvement is more popular than protest participation. Based on the analysis of covariance, youths who participated in community involvement had significantly higher life satisfaction than non-civically active youths in 2006, but not 2018. No significant difference between youths who participated in protest and the non-civically active youths were found. TSMOs did not moderate the relationship between the protest and community involvement and life satisfaction. Policy interventions for encouraging community involvement should take into consideration youth’s preference for less formal structures and institutions, and for TSMOs to evolve to attract and engage youths into their organisations. Future research could extend the study to non-Western countries as TSMOs have spread globally and to empirically test the social capital theory mechanism for civic participation and life satisfaction.