Research projects

This project examines the benefits of volunteering for the political engagement of young people in the UK. Voting is the single most common and important form of political participation in a democracy, and yet today’s young voters have an unprecedented reluctance to turn up at the ballot box. What’s more is that this decline of…

How are young people responding to Brexit, and how does it affect their political engagement? Young People & Brexit is an interdisciplinary study of how young people in the UK feel about and are responding to the most significant policy issue of this Parliament: the UK’s exit from the European Union. Drawing on both existing…

Overview This project utilised a mixed-methods design incorporating interviews, focus groups, a scoping analysis of secondary quantitative data and a cross-national survey to explore the role of trust and transparency within the context of multi-level governance. The core research question focused on the extent to which a pan-European convergence in norms of trust has emerged and its…

This project is a study of young people’s attitudes towards and engagement with the EU referendum campaign. Using data from a dedicated UK-wide survey of under 30s and a wide range of publicly available data and academic research we will address four key themes. These are examining the likelihood to vote among young people and…

Overview This project explored the relationships between participation in higher education and engagement in civil society, especially at the local level. Do university graduates play a distinctive role in the institutions of civil society? More specifically, it examined the extent to which the institutional shift from an elite to a mass system of higher education has…