Introduction

The burgeoning field of youth citizenship in the past three decades has helped to establish the idea that young people are citizens. Despite this, ‘gaps’ are still apparent within and between groups of young people in citizenship understandings, status and opportunities for participation that reflect enduring legacies of stigma, social class, colonisation, race and disability. These gaps can take multiple forms, and they appear in youth citizenship studies as ruptures, inequities, chasms and blind spots in relation to different groups of young people and their citizenship experiences and practices. In this commentary, I examine three of these gaps, namely (i) the Global North/Global South gap in understandings about youth citizenship, (ii) the citizenship status and empowerment gap, and (iii) the citizenship opportunity and participation gap.

While these ‘gaps’ take different forms and have different affects, the overall outcome is that we have a ‘bias’ emerging in both youth citizenship research and in democratic representation. For example, the research on citizenship and young people has overwhelmingly taken place within the Global North, focusing on democratic countries which operate in a certain way and with distinctive perceptions of children and youth. What that means is that when we are talking about ‘youth citizenship’, we are actually frequently talking about a very small group of young people at a global level and taking them to represent the whole (Cooper et al. 2019; Hanson et al. 2018; Swartz 2022). At another level, there is a participation gap whereby young people from privileged backgrounds with the type of social/cultural or ‘participatory capital’ (Wood 2013) that tends to match that of the ruling elites establish a dominance in democratic and participatory spaces. This creates a citizenship status and empowerment ‘gap’. The American Political Science Taskforce on Inequality and American Democracy [APSA] ( 2004, p. 651) put it this way:

The privileged participate more than others and are increasingly well organized to press their demands on government … Citizens with low or moderate incomes speak with a whisper that is lost on the ears of inattentive government, while the advantaged roar with the clarity and consistency that policymakers readily heed.

Similarly to adults, affluent and middle-class young people reflect this pattern and a small elite group dominates the public political space, rendering a large group of young people with little representation, voice and participation opportunities (Kahne and Sporte 2008; Levinson 2010, 2012; Nairn et al. 2006). While these gaps continue to exist for adults, they operate in particular ways for children and young people (as a result of their age, status, resources and the multitude of ways gender, race and social class play out) and deserve greater attention.

Gap 1: the Global North and Global South Youth Knowledge Gap

At the outset, we need to acknowledge that one of the most significant ‘gaps’ in children and youth citizenship is the uneven knowledge between Global North and Global South youth studies. This gap reflects wider patterns whereby the global metropole (primarily Europe and the USA) controls domains of sociological and academic knowledge (Connell et al. 2017), thus overlooking a Youth studies ‘in’, ‘of’ and ‘for’ the Global South (Cooper et al. 2019). The implications of this for youth citizenship research are that much theorising and literature assume a universality of experiences, understandings, values and aspirations that ignore ways of knowing, being and understanding that emanate from the Global South. We have in fact, right now, a distorted knowledge of youth that rests upon knowledge generated about some but not all youth. For example, theories of youth transition reflect the experiences of primarily Global North youth who largely reside in countries with stable democracies, education systems and employment, even if this, at times, comes under threat (see, for example, the special issue on NEETS in Europe by Vieira et al. (2021)). As Sharlene Swartz (2022) has succinctly put it, we cannot talk of a body of knowledge about global youth studies if we recognise that most of it has been written about youth in the Global North, by Global North scholars.

Similarly, the idea of a ‘globalised childhood’ represents an unstated Global North (Western) construction of childhood that has operated with hegemonic power in childhood studies since its origin (Hanson et al. 2018; Nieuwenhuys 1998). As Tatek Atebe outlines in his interview with Hanson, particular ideologies of what the young should do and how they are expected to exist (schooling, domesticity and work) are caught up in a western notion of childhood that then is stated with superiority as the norm for all children (Hanson et al. 2018). This privileges a linear narrative of a modern normative childhood that simply cannot reflect the realities and life experiences of children worldwide (Nieuwenhuys 1998). The impact of this is that it implies that Southern childhoods and childrearing practices, forms of play, school and work are pathologized and deemed deficient and in need of ‘fixing’ (Imoh and Ame 2012), despite the dominant narrative representing only a minority of the world’s children. Several scholars are working to address this gap in citizenship studies with children and youth. In particular, we see a growing group of Indigenous and Global South scholars (see, for examples, Larasati et al. 2020; Nuggehalli 2021; Tom 2021) who are broadening and enriching, and simultaneously critiquing, narrow normative understandings of citizenship and assumptions about the experiences of young citizens.

Gap 2: the Citizenship Status and Empowerment Gap Within Children and Youth

Despite advances in youth citizenship research which has helped to establish a rich vein of understandings about young citizens (Harris et al. 2021; Wood 2022), a gap within children and young people still remains that relates to uneven and unequal experiences of citizenship status. In particular, age, gender, race, disability and social class variables play out in differing ways with some young people not enjoying ‘the full package of rights attached, nor the same security of status’ (van Waas and Jaghai 2018, p. 415).

Children and young people’s experiences of citizenship and membership of communities are still strongly configured by their age. As ‘not-yet-citizens’ under the age of 18, they are often subject to high levels of adult surveillance and censure and this curtails and configures the spaces and places they can occupy (Collins and Kearns 2001; Malone 2002; Vanderbeck and Dunkley 2004; Wood 2016a). While this at times results in direct curtailment of movement (such as curfews of young people after dark (see Collins and Kearns 2001, for an example from a small New Zealand town), at other times, young people’s actions, behaviour and movement in everyday spaces are constrained as a result of the effect of feeling ‘out of place’ (Cele and van der Burgt 2015; Cresswell 1996) or ‘Other’ (Krejsler and Staunæs 2013). Such young people include those who are marked by the ‘psychic landscape of social class’ (Reay 2005), as well as race (Kidman et al. 2021; Laketa 2018; Reynolds 2013), sexuality (Aggleton et al. 2018) and gender (Lister 2008). As these studies show, the experience of citizenship is far from even, revealing that some groups of young people are more excluded or ‘abject’ citizens than others (Sharkey and Shields 2008; Wood 2016), and that further research to expose these differences and how they can be reduced is still needed.

One further significant ‘gap’ in youth citizenship status is how forms of disability shape the experience and status of young citizens. While cognitive, physical and sensory forms of disability can restrict access to citizenship rights, these have been perpetuated further by exclusive ableist assumptions of political liberal theory that overlook different forms of participation and rhythms of time, and less linear notions of citizenship ‘development’ and autonomy (McLaughlin 2023). Critical disability studies are needed to both explore the experience of disability and citizenship and to critique the normative assumptions of citizenship (Kiwan 2022; McLaughlin 2023).

These experiences of ‘semi’ or marginalised citizenship status in turn impact upon citizenship and political efficacy and empowerment. Studies have found that people with high levels of political efficacy are more likely to vote and be involved in civic participation (Kahne and Westheimer 2006; Verba et al. 1995). This notion has underpinned many educational programmes designed to boost young people’ sense of efficacy and equip them with a sense that they are competent civic actors. However, civic empowerment is still fractured along class, racial and socio-economic status lines. With reference to the USA, Levinson (2010) writes that:

There is a profound civic empowerment gap in the US that disproportionately muffles the voices of non-White, foreign-born, and especially low-income citizens and amplifies the voices of White, native-born, and especially wealthy citizens (Levinson 2010, p. 331).

While this empowerment gap has strong evidence in the USA, we need deeper understanding of citizenship participation and the different forms it takes and its impact in/across diverse political systems, and how ‘representative’ such processes are. The final ‘gap’ I explore explains how this also relates to opportunities for participation.

Gap 3: the Civic Opportunity and Participation Gap

The final citizenship gap I will discuss relates to the civic opportunity and participation gap. While the goal of equipping active citizens is a growing feature of policy for educational institutions and local and national governments, research reveals the tendency to provide participation opportunities in places like Local Government to a very narrow group of youth. In particular, those who are deemed to hold potential to be future leaders, and occasionally the ‘trouble-makers’ who demand some type of ‘fixing’, often preoccupy those with opportunities for voice, leadership and representation (Matthews 2001; Matthews and Limb 2003; Nairn et al. 2006). This pattern ignores and excludes the ‘ordinary’ young people who represent the majority of youth but get few participation opportunities. This pattern is frequently repeated in research where many ‘ordinary’ young people are excluded in favour of articulate and confident ones (Wood and Ristow 2022).

Research in many countries also reveals that students who are more academically successful and those who parents have higher socioeconomic status receive more civic learning opportunities (the Civic Opportunity Gap) (Kahne and Middaugh 2009, p. 313; Spring et al. 2007) and attain higher grades in civic learning (the Civic Achievement Gap) (Levinson 2012). A large IEA international study found that students with higher-than-average socio-economic status levels were more than twice as likely to study how laws were made, 1.89 times more likely to report participating in service-learning activities and 1.42 times more likely to report that they had debates, panels and open discussions of political issues in their learning (cited in Kahne and Middaugh 2009). Having citizenship education and participation opportunities while young matter because these build political efficacy and capacity, as studies have shown that students with fewer opportunities for volunteering, social action and political representation in schooling were less inclined to be involved in citizenship action later in life (Kahne and Middaugh 2009; Kahne and Sporte 2008; Levinson 2010). As Levinson (2010, p. 327) puts it, ‘the legitimacy, stability and quality of democratic regimes are all directly dependent on the robust participation of a representative and large cross-section of citizens’.

In sum, there are still many ‘gaps’ in youth citizenship studies that reveal alarming chasms, oversights and bias in what we know about the experiences, knowledge, stories and voices of diverse young citizens. In addition, we have explored how these gaps are reinforced happen through forms of citizenship education and lack of exposure to opportunities for participation. Unless these gaps are attended to, we have a distortion in what we know about youth citizenship as the understandings and young people profiled (predominantly the Global North, elite, White and well resourced) represent only a small subsection of the whole. The ‘gap analysis’ in this commentary reveals that there is still considerable work to be done to achieve social justice, inclusion and equality for all groups of young citizens. As researchers, youth advocates and educators, we still need to ‘mind the gap’.