Political Psychology of Democracy: The Study of Youth Participation in Associations and what we can learn from it

We usually study the emerging of a democratic process (as we can observe presently in some East European countries) searching to analyze globally the impacts on this phenomenon of varied consequences of institutional arrangements. However, how could we determine if such arrangement can appear as an accelerator or as a brake to this process without first reflecting on the logics based on which individuals perceive these arrangements and act into them? In fact, we try to demonstrate in this paper that influence of an institution, whatever it can be, must not be conceived as an unidirectional relation (such as an often used logic implies), and that socialization that it brings about must be analyzed according to a process of the construction of reality by the individual. Thus, profiting from this perspective implies the development of another analytical framework, according to a logic based on relativistic interactionism (as suggested, for example, by Jean Piaget’s works). This framework allows us to propose a new research approach, namely the singular study of individuals inside a context (working at the level of the dialectical processes of how the world of reference of each individual is constructed). The demonstration of the interest of this framework is lead with the help of an analysis of some clusters (built with a particular “hierarchic classification” method) of answers of 1000 or so young people from Québec, questioned in 1990 on their participation and their interest in politics.