Political Participation

At the time of writing, politics within Scotland and the UK is experiencing a period of uncertainty, with issues such as Brexit, Scottish nationalism, the ‘refugee crisis’ and continued economic insecurity creating a complicated and unprecedented political climate. Scotland, for many, is considered to be expressing a distinctive politics to the rest ofthe UK (Mooney, 2013; McAngus, 2015), with the Scottish National Party (SNP) having strong representation in both the Scottish and UK Parliaments. With regard to the electorate, there is a sense that youngpeople in Scotland have recently become more politicised (Baxter et al., 2015; Hopkins, 2015), with sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds having been given the right to vote in the Scottish parliamentary elections and the 2014 independence referendum. This contests the frequent narrative that young people are politically apathetic (Kimberlee, 2002), and adds to a growing body of work that seeks to examine and unearth the varied and complex ways in which young people engage with political issues (Brookes and Hodkinson, 2008; O’Toole and Gale, 2013; Pilkington and Pollock, 2015).