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 make informed political decisions (Everett, 2013), and we hardly know what young people 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.
