DOMONKOS SIK Patterns of political culture in Europe – alienation, indi fference, emancipatory and populist activism 1 e results of the European Parliamentary elections of 2014 revealed an unexpected increase of the popularity of extreme right and Eurosceptic par- ties. According to these results the stability of the European democratic consensus does not seem to be as secured as before. Once again, the question concerning the potential emergence of antidemocratic tendencies has to be posed. While political transformations may be analyzed from many perspec- tives, the following paper is based on a phenomenological approach in a sense that it focuses on ‘political culture’. e notion of political culture, originally elaborated by Almond and Verba, refers to the knowledge about the political system, the attitudes towards it and the political behaviour patterns as well (Almond and Verba 1963 ). 2 In this sense the analysis of political culture focuses on the actors’ interpretation of the political world and their reaction to the perceived social and political difficulties at the same time. In order to grasp not only the existence but also the potential of the emer- gence of antidemocratic tendencies, the political culture of the youngest generation of citizens were systematically examined in the frames of project MYPLACE. Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Georgia, the former East 1 e research has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Pro- gramme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no. 266831 – Memory, Youth, Political Legacy And Civic Engagement (MYPLACE). 2 Since the beginning studies on political culture have been carried out on the border of several academic fields. Sociology (e.g. Inglehart 1977 , Percheron 1993 ), political science (e.g. Barnes-Kaase 1979, Dalton 1996), psychology (e.g. Renhson 1975 ) or social history (e.g. Sears-Valentino 1997 , omas 1979 ) have analysed political and civic formation from di fferent angles. In what follows I rely on this rich tradition without exclusively relying on any speci fic approach.