The future of the EU largely depends on the extent to which it will survive its young citizens’ everyday evaluations. Essentially, youths are assessing its fairness, efficiency, and trustworthiness to promote a life in which their dreams about such things as happiness, justice, and health can be fulfilled. Simultaneously, the young Europeans closely follow how European governance structure manages to avoid poverty, climate change, corruption, and other societal dysfunctions.

Political interest is one of the most important individual-level predictors of media use, public opinion formation and engagement. When, how and why some citizens develop a strong interest in politics is however less clear. This study analyzes the development of political interest during the formative years of adolescence, using a five-wave panel study among Swedish adolescents, covering a period of four years. Based on the citizen communication mediation model, we analyze how interest in political and current affairs news among family and friends influence adolescents’ political interest. Taken together, while the findings lend support for several of the hypotheses, mechanisms and processes derived from the communication mediation model – parents’ appear more important than peers when it comes to shaping adolescents’ political interest.

Political participation is one of the most studied aspects of the contemporary development of western democracies. A recent trend focuses the lack of political participation among younger generations. At the same time, the last decades have also witnessed a growth in the share of young European Union (EU) citizens who express alienation, and distrust toward social and political institutions at the national as well as the European level. By studying young people across different countries of the EU, the current study aims to examine if youths’ political passivity is better explained by political apathy or alienation. Our analyses are based on a comparative survey data collected by the Catch-EyoU project comprising approximately 4 454 late adolescents assembled from eight member countries of the EU. Results from logistic regressions predicting non-voting from apathy and alienation support the idea that political passivity is best understood as the result of political apathy. Moreover, it seems that the underlying separator of apathetic and alienated youths is cognitive awareness of political life. These results are discussed in relation to potentially built-in paradoxes of apathy present in efficient and well-functional welfare-state democracies.