Making sense of politics: how affective dispositions and everyday experiences connect young people with the political

This study aims to understand the cognitive, affective and socially situated processes through which young people make sense of politics. We ask (1) how young people construct understandings of political issues, and (2) when these understandings facilitate their orientation to and connection with political issues. To answer these questions, we conducted 4 × 4 focus groups with groups of 15–30-year-old Dutch people, each time focusing on a, then current, political issue: the Syrian Civil War, the (so-called) US Muslim travel ban, the 2017 Dutch general election, and the US withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement. Our analysis of the group discussions shows that young people make sense of and become emotionally involved in political issues through: (a) feelings of indignation that link a political issue with one’s personal values, (b) media-facilitated affective orientations towards political actors that function as representations of a political issue, and (c) the connection of a political issue with meaningful social contexts and experiences. Our findings add to extant scholarly work on political learning by shedding light on the affective, situated and social processes through which political understandings and orientations are formed in young people.