Precarious Voices? Types of Political Citizens and Repertoires of Action among European Youth

In spite of cross national differences, one of the most relevant concerns for young European people nowadays, is represented by job insecurity. In this contribution, the authors aim to shed light on the triggering role of job precariousness and unemployment on individual repertoires of political actions among young people in three European cities (Lyon in France, Turin in Italy, Cologne in Germany). Theoretically, the paper addresses the existing limitations in the literature on precarious workers’ political participation by proposing a new comprehensive framework which includes a broad set of actions, including institutionalized and non-institutionalized forms of political action (e.g. petitions, public demonstrations, disruptive actions). Empirically, a quantitative descriptive technique - Latent Class Cluster Analysis (LCCA)- is deployed allowing to take into account different variables (e.g. socio-demographic conditions, educational attainment, age, employment status and political beliefs) to portray, for each city under analysis and for each ‘mode’ of participation, a set of ideal-typical individual profiles.