Young people, between policies and politics

Plenty of studies deal with young people. Economists on the one hand have a long tradition of analyzing youth unemployment, while sociologists have institutionalized the sub-discipline of sociology of youth, also called youth studies. Youth sociologists have shown to what extent the transition to adulthood has been postponed and transformed, leading to this new period of life that is youth. Only recently have political scientists begun to take into account this metamorphosis of the life course. In this article, I review studies on youth transitions from the comparative politics perspective. First, I will present the varieties of policies that structure these youth transitions. Second, I will analyze work on the politics of such transitions that try to identify their causes.