Sociology and Anthropology 4(4): 228-240, 2016 http://www.hrpub.org DOI: 10.13189/sa.2016.040405 Differences and Inequalities in Civic Participation among Bulgarian Youth Siyka Kovacheva 1,* , Stanimir Kabaivanov 2 1 Department of Applied Sociology, Faculty of Philosophy and History, University of Plovdiv, Bulgaria 2 Department of Finance, Faculty of Economic and Social Sciences, University of Plovdiv, Bulgaria Copyright©2016 by authors, all rights reserved. Authors agree that this article remains permanently open access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 International License Abstract This paper addresses the question: what explains the differences in young Bulgarians’ involvement in informal volunteering, participation in associations and civic protests twenty-five years after the regime change. The explanation is based on the results of a representative social survey with 1030 young people aged 14-27 in the summer of 2014, funded by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. The data show that both attitudinal and behavioral measures of civic engagement are influenced, albeit in different degrees, by structural factors such as gender, education, family background, ethnicity, locality and socio-economic status. A very important intervening variable is trust which in this survey is measured towards a variety of social groups. In general, young people in the country tend to express high trust in family and friends and low trust in people outside their immediate milieu. This kind of social capital mobilizing closed horizontal ties ensures support in uncertain times but does not enable more enriching, even if uncertain, contacts with members of wider communities. It also influences the types of voluntary actions young people engage in: more often informal personal assistance for people they know or see directly and much less often formal involvement in NGO activities. Having higher education, middle to high socioeconomic status, living in large cities or the country’s capital provide opportunities for the young to recognize the benefits of membership in civic associations. Keywords Youth Participation, Voting, Volunteering, Civic Values, Trust, Social Inequalities 1. Introduction Youth participation has attracted a growing research attention over the years, which has been fed by recurring outbursts of youth mobilizations, as well as by the seeming absence of civic involvement in the more peaceful periods between protests. Normative assumptions about the ‘proper’ forms and demands of youth movements and policy concerns with the ‘civics deficit’ have brought about a proliferation of studies of youth involvement in public life. It is assumed that active participation is a route to young people’s integration in society and social cohesion more broadly. Youth engagement in the democratic institutions serves to legitimate policy decision-making in the youth field by claiming that young people’s voice is heard and represented in policy programs and measures. Policy makers tend to define participation as involvement only in officially recognized and formalized channels [1] [2] and overlook informal everyday participatory practices of young people. In classical political science mass participation is put forward as a prerequisite of democracy [3] [4]. Much of the more recent research [5] [6] is built upon rational choice theories with the aim to create models explaining age and other differences in both conventional and unconventional political engagement. Youth studies provide a more nuanced picture of youth involvement in public life by expanding the research field in several significant ways. First of all, youth research has explored non-traditional and non-formal ways in which young people are engaged in civic and political life [7]. We now have accounts of myriad intangible participatory practices beyond the institutional/non-institutional divide. Second, and linked to this, youth studies have widened the meaning of participation beyond the traditional understanding of the political as a power to influence broader communities. Research reveals how civic participation is closely linked to young people’s identity formation and personal self-realization [8] [1]. Young women and men are searching for new styles of participation that are more flexible in meeting their individualized concerns and which allow the linking of subjective biographies with public issues [2] [9]. Underlining the significance of youth participation might lead to ‘romanticizing the relationship to social change’, as Miles [10] warns against. In late modern consumer societies young people’s experience is ‘more about reproducing everyday patterns of consumption than it is about challenging those patterns’ ([10], 106). The trend to