Explaining youth radicalism as a positioning of the self at opposite extremes
| Author | Lorenzo Bosi,Katrin Uba |
| Published date | 01 February 2022 |
| Date | 01 February 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0263395721990539 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0263395721990539
Politics
2022, Vol. 42(1) 128 –145
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/0263395721990539
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Explaining youth radicalism
as a positioning of the self at
opposite extremes
Katrin Uba
Uppsala University, Sweden
Lorenzo Bosi
Scuola Normale Superiore, Italy
Abstract
The concept of ‘young radicals’ is gaining ground in a context of generalized discontent – often,
this is due to the fact that young people engage increasingly in unconventional forms of political
activism. Much less is known about young people holding radical political attitudes. This article
advances our understanding of those young people who place themselves on the extremes of the
ideological scale and investigates how those with radical right attitudes differ from those with
radical left ones. Drawing on a survey that gathers data from nine European countries, with a
sample of young people aged 18–35, we test those factors that have been used to explain why
people use violent repertoires of action: social background, gender, political values, and prior
experience in protest activism. The results relate ‘radicalness’ to experienced economic difficulties
and the more contentious political activism. The difference between the young ‘radicals’ in right
and left are, however, defined by gender and adherence to authoritarian values.
Keywords
extremes, left, radicalism, right, youth
Received: 11th June 2020; Revised version received: 28th September 2020; Accepted: 10th December 2020
Introduction
Existing research on young people predominantly focuses on two things: young people’s
political alienation and their lack of interest in politics (Blais et al., 2004), and the fact
that youth has opted for unconventional forms of political activism rather than the more
common, electoral type of politics (Norris, 2002). Scholars have paid far less attention to
the political attitudes of young people. Some consider the latter as not well equipped to
Corresponding author:
Katrin Uba, Department of Government, Uppsala University, Box 514, Uppsala, 75120, Sweden.
Email: Katrin.Uba@statsvet.uu.se
990539POL0010.1177/0263395721990539PoliticsUba and Bosi
research-article2021
Special Issue Article
Uba and Bosi 129
make informed political decisions (Everett, 2013), and we hardly know what young peo-
ple mean when they make reference to the ‘left’ or the ‘right’ (Mieriņa, 2018). Political
orientation, in relation to the general population, has been considered important for the
sustainability of representative democracy (Gomez et al., 2016; Rooduijn et al., 2017;
Visser et al., 2014). Given that political attitudes developed at a young age tend to persist
into adulthood (Siedler, 2011), and in view of the fact that radical political attitudes reside
not at the pathological margins but must be considered ‘mainstream’ (Miller-Idriss,
2018a), it is particularly important to learn more about young people holding radical
political attitudes.
Before 9/11, the term ‘radical’ was often used to designate those people on either end
of the political spectrum who wished to alter the social order. The term had more com-
monly been applied to the left, in particular, during the 19th century, when it denoted a
progressive liberal ideology inspired by the French Revolution (Gordon and Kinna,
2019), but the expression ‘radical right’ was also used after the Second World War. In the
aftermath of the four coordinated violent attacks by Al-Qaeda against the United States
in September 2009, the term ‘radical’ increasingly began to be used to distinguish people
based on their violent repertoires of action, rather than on their attitudes (Bosi, 2012). In
the field of political violence and terrorism, ‘radicalization came to be understood pre-
dominantly as the gradual adoption of “extremist” ideas that promote and eventually
lead to acts of terrorism’ (Malthaner, 2017: 370). Scholars in this field of studies have
mostly implied that attitudes are a proxy for violent behaviour, conflating the ‘radical’
concept with that of ‘radicalization’ (Moghaddam, 2005; Schils and Verhage, 2017).
However, ‘[m]ost people who hold radical ideas do not engage in terrorism, and many
terrorists – even those who claim to a “cause” – are not deeply ideological and may not
“radicalize” in any traditional sense’ (Bjørgo and Horgan, 2009; Borum, 2011: 8; Bosi
and O’Dochartaigh, 2018).
We acknowledge that it is difficult to define the concept of being ‘radical’, since it
mostly depends on the equally problematic notion of its point of reference – being ‘mod-
erate’. Both concepts are also context-dependent, as a person, attitudes, or an action that
is radical in comparison to a person, attitudes, or action that is moderate at one time or in
one space, might not be radical or moderate in another period or space (Beck, 2015;
Mieriņa, 2018). At the same time, it is important to remember that those who label people
decide who is moderate and who is radical depending on his or her values, political posi-
tion, moral scope and the nature of his or her relationship with radical and moderate
people. Hence, the labelling is often ideologically laden and heavily contested. In order to
avoid the problem of defining the context-related concept of ‘radicalism’, we will rely on
classics. In an old study, Lipset and Raab (1970: 4) noted the following: ‘in terms of spe-
cific issues, extremism mostly means the tendency to go to the poles of the ideological
scale’. We will, therefore, focus exclusively on individuals’ self-placement on the ideo-
logical scale, which counts 11 steps and ranges from left to right, the poles being labelled
with the numbers 0 for the left, and 10 for the right.
Despite emerging studies in youth political attitudes (Mieriņa, 2018; Mitrea et al.,
2020), we still have very limited knowledge of young people holding radical political
attitudes. While the overall general research question driving this article is, who are these
young ‘radicals’, we specifically ask two main questions: first, how do young ‘radicals’
differ from those young people who place themselves anywhere else than at the edges of
the scales? Second, in contrast to the uniform understanding of radicals often conveyed in
the literature, we seek to answer, what are the differences between the young ‘radicals’ at
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