In my master's thesis, I was interested in the relation between political participation and young environmental activists. Young people nowadays are less and less involved in politics at its formal level, despite the fact that their participation plays an important role in achieving political change. According to opinion polls, the turnout of young people in Slovenia has been declining over the years, but many researchers are finding that young people are increasingly involved in alternative political activities, such as protests, boycotts, demonstrations, etc. Young environmental activists in Slovenia began to receive a lot of media attention in 2019, when Fridays for future protests began to take place, which gave them more motivation to find new ways to change the world for the better. By conducting nine in-depth interviews, I explored how they participate on a formal and informal level and how their impulses relate to their political orientation. The results of the research also showed that they believe that the role of young people in political decision-making is almost nil, that they participate much more in the informal sphere of politics than in the formal one, and that everyone is more or less left-wing on the political compass.
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