Abstract

BRUNO, Daniela  and  BARREIRO, Alicia. The social representation of democracy of Argentinean adolescents. Escritos de Psicología [online]. 2015, vol.8, n.3, pp.33-40. ISSN 1989-3809.  https://dx.doi.org/10.5231/psy.writ.2015.1506.

Since the late twentieth century, several studies have shown the distancing and dissatisfaction of citizens of different ages in relation to political parties, which has led to the phenomenon known as a crisis of political representation. The purpose of this paper was to investigate the social representations of democracy of Argentinean adolescents. A study was conducted using intentional sampling that included 376 participants between the ages of 16 and 18 years (M=16.87, SD=0.734). The participants were administered the word association technique with the word "democracy" as the inductor term. The results show that the central core of the participants' social representation of democracy consisted of the following terms: "vote, freedom, equality, rights, people, freedom of expression, participation, and opinion". In conclusion, the participants thought of democracy in terms of values and operating mechanisms inherent to the representative democracy political system, although they did not associate it with politics or a government institution.

Keywords : Social Representation; Democracy; Adolescents.

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