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TEACHING DEMOCRACY TO GENERATION Z: WHY NON-FORMAL EDUCATION IS EUROPE’S BEST KEPT SECRET

In the 2024 European Parliament elections, overall voter turnout remained stable at 50.74% — but among young people under 25, participation actually fell. Only 36% of eligible voters in this age group cast ballots, a 6-point drop from 42% in 2019 (FEPS, 2024). According to the European Parliament’s own post-election report, the most common reasons young people gave for not voting were other commitments (16%), not having enough information to make a choice (16%), and not finding any relatable candidate or political party (15%) (European Commission, 2025).

These figures tell a troubling story. Young people across Europe are deeply engaged in the social issues of our time — from climate change to racial justice — yet they remain systematically disengaged from the formal political processes designed to address them. The question is not whether young people care. It is whether the systems of democratic participation were built with them in mind.

Civics education in formal school settings has long been proposed as the fix. But evidence increasingly suggests that classroom-based instruction — lectures, textbooks, written assignments — has a limited effect on democratic behavior. What works, researchers argue, is something quite different: learning democracy by doing it.

This is the essence of non-formal education. Unlike formal schooling, non-formal education is participatory by design. It meets young people where they are — in youth centers, online spaces, community organizations, and informal social settings. It uses simulation games, role play, creative arts, debate, and collaborative problem-solving to build civic skills from the inside out. A longitudinal study on civic education interventions in secondary schools found that participatory approaches significantly reduced ethnic prejudice and social dominance orientation, while increasing trust in institutions and civic engagement intention (Martini et al., 2023).

The Council of Europe’s Youth Partnership (2023) has long documented the value of non-formal approaches for citizenship education, civic participation, and intercultural dialogue — and noted their particular effectiveness in reaching young people marginalized from mainstream education. A 2026 UNESCO report further confirms that when governments commit to meaningful youth engagement mechanisms, participation translates into real policy influence — but also warns that only one in three countries currently has formal structures in place to enable this.

Despite the evidence, non-formal civic education remains massively underinvested. It is largely delivered by youth organizations running on minimal budgets, with limited access to high-quality, up-to-date materials that reflect contemporary youth realities — including digital media environments, online hate speech, and algorithmically curated information.

The Youth for Coexistence (Y4C) project is working to change this. As part of its key outputs, Y4C is developing a Digital Youth Democracy Toolkit — a comprehensive non-formal education resource incorporating active citizenship kits, fake news and disinformation literacy tools, social action approaches, and creative methods for exploring democracy and coexistence. A Digital Peacebuilding Game will bring these concepts to life through interactive, game-based learning designed for youth groups and workshops.

These tools are being built by practitioners for practitioners — grounded in the realities of youth work across five European countries and designed to be adapted and reused far beyond the life of the project. Because democracy is not a spectator sport, it must be practiced — and youth workers are some of its most important coaches.

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