The good European citizen: Person-centered analysis of citizenship norms and their correlates in young people from seven European countries

Within the academic debate about good citizenship, several authors have emphasized different possible notions – such as adhesion to more traditional-elitist, solidarity-based or participative norms (Denters, Gabriel, & Torcal, 2007). Recently, scholars have proposed the use of person- centred approaches to analyze typologies of good citizenship conceptions (Hooghe, Oser & Marien, 2016; Reichert, 2016). The existing studies have not addressed until now the European political context or investigated ideas of good citizenship related to a supranational level. The present study examines by means of latent profile analysis young people’s patterns of adhesion to different notions about what is a good European citizen and investigates how the different groups are characterized by socio-demographic characteristics, levels of participation and perceptions of belonging or political alienation related to the European context. The study is part of the Catch-EyoU project and uses the pilot questionnaire data with a sample of 994 respondents from two age groups –adolescents (16-19 years old, 52.7%) and young adults (20-26 years old, 47.3%)– collected in eight European countries. The results identified five different profiles that distinguished between youth who held a mixed conception of the good European citizen (where different normative ideas coexist), groups that emphasized a particular view and a pattern of low adhesion to all theorized conceptions. While most respondents give high importance on both traditional and more participative norms, the findings confirm the existence of comparatively more passive views and of a critically oriented group differentiated by more negative perception of the European context.