Political participation of unemployed youth : the moderator effect of associational membership

This article discusses how associational membership can compensate for that lack of opportunities and motivation necessary for political participation that unemployment usually provokes. We investigate such a moderator effect of associational membership by means of a CATI survey of young people realized in two different cities: Turin in Italy and Kielce in Poland. The survey was part of a larger research on youth unemployment funded by the EU FP7 program (Younex). We propose an exploratory analysis allowing us to assess at a low level of abstraction and through a local level comparison, how far associational membership performs even across different contexts as a promoter of political engagement of a specific group of young, deprived, individuals.