Engaging the Millennials: The Citizens’ Initiative in Finland

Millennials’disengagement from institutionalized politics has been a cause for concernamong scholars and pundits. Consequently, there is an increased interest inpossibilities to mobilize them through new participatory mechanisms, but theresults are still unclear. We contribute to this research agenda by examiningwhether the Finnish citizens’ initiative mobilized the millennial generationwith data from the Finnish National Election Survey from 2015 (FNES2015).Furthermore, we use the civic voluntarism model (CVM) to explore what factorsexplain the involvement of millennials in supporting citizens’ initiatives todetermine whether users differ from non-users and whether CVM works differentlyfor millennials as compared to the general population. Our results show thatmillennials are frequent users of the initiative. We find few significantdifferences between millennial users and non-users, suggesting that using thecitizens’ initiative is egalitarian among millennials. We also find no evidencethat the CVM model works differently for millennials.