Democracy is under strain in Europe and across the world, and young people are at the centre of it. Today’s youth will become the political majority. What they believe and what they do will decide whether democracy flourishes, declines or is abandoned.

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Evolving Democracy With Europe's Next Generation sets out the thinking behind the Evens Foundation's new direction. It identifies five pressures driving the democratic crisis: socio-economic and cultural fragmentation, a crisis of representation and polarisation, youth disengagement, a modernisation gap as technology outpaces democratic institutions, and the rise of modern autocracy as a credible alternative.

"People who feel democracy isn't working for them, or isn’t listening to them, will start looking elsewhere. That is a rational response to a real failure, and it is a different problem from apathy," explained Evens Foundation Executive Director Joe Elborn.

In response, the paper lays out two linked tracks of work over the next three years. The first is about people: rebuilding the places and habits that let young people disagree well, from physical youth spaces to online role models who show what constructive disagreement looks like. The second is about tools: building digital democratic infrastructure, including at least five new tools, from AI that helps elected representatives understand the citizens they represent to platforms that scale up citizens’ assemblies, alongside a push for recommender systems designed to serve democracy, not outrage.

The approach is deliberately different: intellectual honesty over popularity, experiments that may fail, and a commitment to diagnosing those failures openly. All of it rests on an ethical charter of plurality, political neutrality and liberal democracy.

The paper was written by Jonathan Evens and Joe Elborn with the Evens Foundation board and team.