Adolescents' Democratic Engagement. A Qualitative Study into Dutch Adolescents' Narratives about their Citizenship in a Democratic and Pluralist Society

This dissertation reported a narrative inquiry into a normative phenomenon: thick democratic engagement. We investigated the lived citizenship of students, developed a thick concept of democracy, discussed limitations of existing concepts of democracy and democratic citizenship in research on democratic citizenship education, and theorized about the interrelatedness of one’s perceptions of democracy and the type of democratic engagement that one develops, and about the complexity of thick democratic development.As such, our research stands in a tradition of value embedded research in Political Philosophy, Child Development and Humanistic research.