This study analyses the extent to which the recent economic crisis influences the political attitudes that are fundamental to legitimacy of a democratic system of government. The article focuses on two questions: how much does crisis exposure affect democratic legitimacy attitudes? And what is the role played by social mobility perspective on this effect? The findings, based on a sample of the Life in Transition Survey II, show that economic crisis exposure significantly affects political legitimacy attitudes. The results confirm that higher crisis exposure is associated with lower legitimacy. Additionally, the present research rules out the possibility that crisis exposure affects attitudes in a specific way, depending on the expected mobility valence. While replicating previous evidence supporting the negative democratic effect of adverse economic changes, the current research sheds light on the critical role that the future perspective plays in determining this effect.

This article discusses how associational membership can compensate for that lack of opportunities and motivation necessary for political participation that unemployment usually provokes. We investigate such a moderator effect of associational membership by means of a CATI survey of young people realized in two different cities: Turin in Italy and Kielce in Poland. The survey was part of a larger research on youth unemployment funded by the EU FP7 program (Younex). We propose an exploratory analysis allowing us to assess at a low level of abstraction and through a local level comparison, how far associational membership performs even across different contexts as a promoter of political engagement of a specific group of young, deprived, individuals.