© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI: 10.1163/15691330-12341252 Comparative Sociology 12 (2013) 1–30 brill.com/coso COMPARATIVE SOCIOLOGY The Differential Impact of Education on Young People’s Political Activism: Comparing Italy and the United Kingdom Maria Grasso Department of Politics, University of Shefijield Elmijield, Northumberland Road, Shefijield S10 2TU m.grasso@shefijield.ac.uk Abstract It is a common theme in the literature on voter turnout that advanced Western democracies have entered a period of political disengagement and that it is young people, in particular, that participate less. In this paper, I analyse data from the three waves of the European Social Survey and show that while young people are in general less likely to be politically involved than their elders, these differences are greater in the United Kingdom than in Italy. In addition, I show that controlling for education accounts for differences in political participation between young and older people in Italy. However, education does not appear to mediate youth political involvement in the United Kingdom so that normative concerns about youth political disengagement appear to be more appropriate for the latter of the two countries. Keywords participation, young people, disengagement Introduction It is a common theme in the literature that advanced Western democracies have entered a period of political disengagement and that political partici- pation is becoming increasingly irrelevant to the lives of Western citizens (Mulgan 1994; Dalton and Wattenberg 2000; Levi and Stoker 2000; Van Deth 2000; Mair 2006). It is common for social commentators, especially in