Political Participation of Unemployed Youth: The Moderator Effect of Associational Membership

This article discusses how associational membership can compensate for that lack of opportuni- ties and motivation necessary for political participation that unemployment usually provokes. We investigate such a moderator effect of associational membership by means of a CATI survey of young people realized in two different cities: Turin in Italy and Kielce in Poland. The survey was part of a larger research on youth un- employment funded by the EU FP7 program (Younex). We propose an exploratory analysis allowing us to as- sess at a low level of abstraction and through a local level comparison, how far associational membership performs even across different contexts as a promoter of political engagement of a specific group of young, deprived, individuals.