Cognitive Polyphasia, Social Representations and Political Participation in Adolescents

Abstract

Studies conducted in the last few decades show that young people have a negative evaluation of politics since they relate it to conventional forms of participation. In addition, they engage in unconventional forms of political participation, though they do not think of them as political practices. In this context, a qualitative study was carried out in order to describe the social representations of politics through the narratives provided by adolescents during an interview based on Piaget’s clinical method. The results obtained reveal the coexistence of two representations of politics: a conventional and an unconventional one. The representation in which politics is mainly understood as conventional forms of participation appears to be hegemonic, although a polemic unconventional representation was identified. Moreover, in many of the subjects both representations coexist in state of cognitive polyphasia that express a relation of selective prevalence between them, depending on the discursive context they are elicited.