New Perspectives on Democratic Breakdown: Weimar’s Youth - Mobilisation and Discourse Networks

Citizen involvement and the institutions of civil society can be decisive for the collapse of a democratic regime. Research on the Weimar Republic pointed to undemocratic mobilisation in this regime crisis. However, the specific profile of those who mobilised during Weimar’s breakdown has been ignored. The systematic analysis of primary sources underlines the prevalence of political youth mobilisation. Their political practice triggered controversial debates about the meaning of youth which shaped the way contemporaries made sense of their political reality. Youth encompassed debates beyond the social group and conflicts over the meaning of youth convey conflicts in Weimar’s democracy. My study examines a corpus of newspaper articles through a technique of discourse analysis that combines qualitative content analysis with network analysis. This is the first time this method is applied to regime change. This research allows, on a theoretical level, a reconceptualization of the political role of youth in democratic breakdowns.