The departure of younger generations from the political sphere has triggered an avalanche of developmental research showing an enormous apathy and an increasing distrust on politics and political issues which seems to contribute to decreasing levels of participation in the civil society, particularly between young people. Literature has revealed, mainly in these last decades, that civic participation is crucial to uphold the consolidation of democracies and to promote civic engagement in adulthood, since youngster’s civic experiences are pointed out as their strongest predictor. Growing concern about younger generations’ disengagement from the political sphere has sparked a wave of developmental research on the psychological underpinnings of civic participation, behaviours and attitudes. Several studies have been showing that a lot can be done in the educational contexts where young people spent a significant part of their daily lives, namely in schools that have a relevant developmental role in terms of participation experiences provided (and quality of those experiences). Unfortunately very little longitudinal research has studied the quality of participation experiences on youth political development. In Portugal, youth participation experiences are mainly linked to academic world and competencies (namely computer skills, English lessons, sport activities within schools but after school hours). After the Portuguese revolution in 1974 that change dramatically the life of adolescents’ parents in order to bring democracy to our country, the reality of young people civic and political participation is being characterized by low levels of participation that seems to be due to an incipient civic culture (Villaverde Cabral & Machado Pais, 1998).

This research involves 616 youth students from four moments of data collection with three overlapping cohorts (4x3). The first cohort is constituted by 9th grade students, the second cohort by 10th grade students and the third cohort is composed by students from 11th grade. We followed-up the 9th grade students during three years until the 12th grade (end of secondary education). All students completed a survey during class time (30m.) Classes were randomly selected. Using a cohort-sequential longitudinal method, our study intends to shed light on the exploration of the quality’s evolution quality along and across time, identifying in which associations young people are involved. Using SPSS (15.0 version) descriptive findings show that voluntary associations and scouts are the most common activity between adolescents. As a first step in analysing which factors uphold participation experiences a Regression Linear analysis was made and, as a result, democratic classroom climates were classified by students and resulted in a significant predictor. Additionally we examined gender differences in terms of the relevance of an open classroom climate to adolescents’ political development. Results reveal that the impact of classrooms is more significant for girls than for boys. Therefore we did a Manova repeated measures in order to analysed the personal meaningful that participation in youth associations has to participants and the impact of those experiences in behavioural and attitudinal dimensions of young people political development will also be achieved. The personal meaning associated to their experiences by the ones that have high quality of participation experiences is, in a larger scale, the personal growth.

As a conclusion quality of juvenile participation appears as a very significant predictor on the youngster’s dispositions to be politically active in the future, as adult. Results seem to reinforce the role of adolescents’ life contexts and of quality of experiences in the promotion of the political development. The implication of these results for the design of intervention projects in this domain seems to have an impact in terms of educational strategies to implement in educational contexts (in and out of school activities). In sum, quality creates a cycle of (good) participation experiences – what world needs!