From Context to Choice. A Sequential Mixed-Methods Design for Studying the Generative Mechanisms of Youth Electoral Abstention

To what extent does analysing configurations of generative mechanisms capture the complexity of youth electoral abstention as choice? Electoral abstention emerges from the interplay between macro-structural conditions and micro-level dynamics. At the macro level, institutional, political, and socio-demographic contexts shape opportunity structures and participation costs (Cancela & Geys, 2016). At the micro level, abstention relates to dispositions (values, affect, cognition), socio-economic resources, and relational processes through which preferences are formed-ranging from political socialisation to late campaign stimuli. A mechanism-based perspective reconstructs how these factors combine and interact, generating differentiated abstention profiles across contexts. The design responds to three gaps in the literature: youth are typically treated as sub-samples within general surveys (producing semantic mismatches around “politics”; Weiss, 2020), “youth” is weakly operationalised, and standard instruments are insufficiently sensitive to contextual and youth-specific meanings. Fieldwork is conducted in Rome, stratifying municipalities into urban zones and re-aggregating them by socio-economic and territorial similarity. The study adopts a sequential, instrumental mixed-methods strategy: a tailored survey constitutes the core, while qualitative interviews support the pilot, pre-test, and deviant-case analysis. Anomalous patterns are treated as analytically strategic to refine existing hypotheses or generate new ones, enhancing measurement validity and contextual fit (Mauceri, 2016). Pilot interviews (n=18) suggest variation by sites of political socialisation, educational trajectory, and lifecourse phase. Voting is often narrated as a socially meaningful occasion, whereas political discussion within friendship groups remains episodic. Moreover, the attribution of “political” relevance to salient issues differs markedly, especially by levels of political interest. This project is among the few youth-only abstention studies adopting a mixed-methods approach. It introduces an innovative sampling logic based on a maximum of three prior experiences of national/supranational elections and provides a multidimensional, configurational account linking context, resources, dispositions, and relational processes to distinct abstention profiles.