Youth in Politics and Democratic Innovation

On Thursday, December 7, ASEF together with the European Association of Law Students ELSA Ljubljana, organized a popular science lecture as part of the ASEF young minds lecture series at the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana. This time the lecture was given by Lucija Tacer, ASEF Junior Fellow 2022, a graduate of economics and political science at Vanderbilt University and a law graduate at the Faculty of Law at the University of Ljubljana.

In this lecture, we talked about the political involvement of young people and thus the different ways in which individuals can actively participate in politics.

The fact is that the political involvement of young people is quite low, but the situation is improving over the years, which is also shown by the fact that political parties are paying more attention to youth programs and youth parties. The question of how to increase political participation is always relevant, and these factors include political knowledge, interest, a sense of political power and political trust, which also includes trust in institutions. This trust only grows if citizens are enabled to have a greater influence on public affairs, for example by involving the public in democratic processes.

Furthermore, Lucija presented us a little more about the role of the public in the process of amending the Constitution and about the public debate. Then we devoted time to democratic innovations, and she also presented us with examples of various countries where a people’s initiative was given and how the process went.

The entire event was coordinated by Martin Rihtaršič, an ASEF Junior Fellow of the 2022 generation.

The ASEF Young Minds project is supported by the Office of the Republic of Slovenia for Youth.