Understanding Policy Instrument Choice Concerning Citizenship in Education and Youth Policies: A Typology of Public Tools (Citoyenneté des enfants et des adolescents; no. 80)

This article proposes a typology of public action instruments mobilized in the education and youth sectors. Three main ones currently coexist: legislative and regulatory, conventional and incentive, informative and communicational. They favor dimensions of citizenship (legal, political and civil) and are aimed at both pupils and young people. This typology is a tool for grasping the meaning of public action, highlighting the preferences of decision-makers for certain types of devices2 and recalling that heterogeneous devices coexist and structure juvenile experiences. In this regard, the taking into account of these devices in the analysis of careers and youth engagement practices is very uneven in the surveys, even though they constitute markers in the same way as other experiences contributing to political socialization, such as participation in protest actions. Given the development of public systems, this marginalization is not without effects on the understanding of the role of the latter in the construction of juvenile practices. After a general presentation of the typology, the main characteristics of the three identified instruments are analyzed.