Samenvatting

Little is known about views on democracy of adolescents. In this article we describe results of our interview study with forty adolescents of fourteen years old on their views of democracy and decision making. The study focuses on the daily lives of adolescents and decision making within local contexts, such as the classroom. The adolescents’ views on decision making appear to correspond to the models of democracy as we know them, that is majoritarian democracy (the largest group), consensual democracy or deliberative democracy. However, only some of the adolescents have an explicit understanding of the concept of democracy and most have limited political knowledge. For these students, the experience or feeling of being part of a political democracy is still something ‘far away’ and not something of any relevance in their daily lives.