Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Politics of Adolescence and Democracy

IP-PAD（青少年与民主政治的跨学科视角）旨在解决一个及时，紧迫的社会问题，即了解青少年公民如何处理政治信息以及这如何影响他们参与政治。青年参与政治对民主的未来始终至关重要，因为今天的青少年将成为明天有投票权的公民。他们的政治参与在今天似乎更加重要，因为我们目睹了青年对民主的满意度下降，而与此同时，气候变化、错误信息、选民投票率下降、两极分化和激进化等社会和政治挑战使人们对欧洲自由民主国家的未来感到担忧。为了实现这些目标，IP-PAD将首次以系统，严格和互利的方式整合两个主要研究领域：第一，从政治和社会科学的角度研究青年政治参与的广泛文献;第二，从发展心理学和神经科学领域获得的关于青少年大脑发生的广泛变化的见解。虽然这两种观点在各自方面都很丰富，但迄今为止一直被分开。IP-PAD认为，要严格理解青少年如何处理政治信息，需要将这两个方面结合起来。IP-PAD将通过研究五个欧洲国家不同社会政治背景下青少年大脑的发展如何支撑社会自我的出现，并最终支撑政治自我的出现，来填补这一空白。通过整合这两种观点，并与欧洲三大非学术合作伙伴（欧洲青年议会，盖洛普国际，Counterpoint Global）合作，IP-PAD将为年轻一代的社会科学家提供深入的跨学科培训，以进行开放，严谨，创新和有影响力的研究。

IP-PAD (Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Politics of Adolescence & Democracy) aims to address a timely, pressing societal issue, namely the understanding of how young adolescent citizens process political information and how this affects their engagement with politics. Youth engagement with politics has always been crucial for the future of democracy as the adolescents of today become the voting citizens of tomorrow. Their political engagement seems even more important today as we have witnessed a decline in youth satisfaction with democracy, while at the same time the social and political challenges of climate change, misinformation, declining voter turnout, polarization and radicalization raise concerns about the future of liberal democracies in Europe. To address these aims, IP-PAD will integrate, for the first time, in a systematic, rigorous and mutually beneficial way two main areas of research: first, the extensive literature on youth political engagement from the perspective of political and social sciences; and second, the insights on the wide-ranging changes that occur in the adolescent brain, obtained from the fields of developmental psychology and neuroscience. While prolific in their own respect, these two perspectives have till now been kept separate. IP-PAD argues that a rigorous understanding of how adolescents process political information requires the integration of these two strands. IP-PAD will fill this gap by studying how the developing adolescent brain in the different sociopolitical contexts of five European countries underpins the emergence of the social, and eventually, political self. By integrating these two perspectives and in collaboration with three major European non-academic partners (European Youth Parliament, Gallup International, Counterpoint Global) IP-PAD will provide an in-depth interdisciplinary training to a young generation of social scientists in conducting open, rigorous, innovative and impactful research.