Back in the thirteenth century, Frederick II of Sicily reportedly wanted to discover which language children would speak if they never heard anyone talk. Would it be Hebrew, Greek, or Latin? According to the chronicler Salimbene, he had infants cared for by nurses who were instructed to feed and wash them but forbidden to speak to or offer them affection. The experiment yielded no answer because the children died. The question behind it is unsettling: what can we expect people to develop when we withhold the conditions that make it possible?

In Pakistan, Gen Z has been subject to a different kind of experiment. Instead of observing whether they can speak, we want to see whether they can speak up, while giving them very little space or exposure to what democratic participation looks like. We expect young people to become active citizens without giving them many opportunities to practise being one.

One of my first memories of hearing about governance is sitting in a car at a red light while my parents discussed whether stopping was safe. Too many cars in one place, they worried, could make us vulnerable to an attack. At school, I sometimes imagined which exit I would take if something happened. After the tragic APS attack in December 2014, these fears became part of school life through security checks and emergency drills. My first memory of hearing the word election was through a newscaster breaking the news of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, twelve days before the parliamentary elections were originally scheduled. I heard the words terrorism, assassination, and attack before I registered words like democracy, politics, and participation.

For me, public life first became something to survive. The spaces where I might have learned how to participate in it offered few alternatives.

As students, we heard of student unions the same way we heard of Aladdin: a myth, a fairy tale. General Zia-ul-Haq imposed the nationwide ban on student unions on February 9, 1984. Forty-two years have passed since that decision. There have been subsequent attempts at restoration, yet the ban is still 13 years older than the oldest Gen Z.  

This is not to say that a well-run student union will, by itself, produce a more democratic country. It can, however, let a young person discover something essential early on: their voice has value, other people’s voices do too, and decisions affecting everyone should be open to everyone’s scrutiny. When you cannot question a steep increase in tuition fees while watching classmates struggle to stay enrolled, you begin to wonder whether speaking up has any power to begin with. Whether your participation even matters. When people have little influence over decisions at this level, it becomes harder to believe they will have influence anywhere else.

But these early experiences do not have to determine everything that follows. A young person who has never experienced responsive leadership can still encounter it. The question is whether the opportunities available now give them any reason to expect something different.

Pakistan’s youth participation problem becomes clearer when we follow a young person beyond election day. PILDAT estimated that 48% of young voters cast a ballot in the 2024 general election, matching overall turnout. That is evidence of electoral engagement, although it does not tell us whether those voters subsequently influenced policy or trusted the institutions elected. After voting, where does a young person take a proposal about an unaffordable bus route, an inaccessible college, or an unstaffed health facility? Effective participation requires an identifiable decision-maker, a procedure for raising the issue, and a reasonable prospect of receiving an answer. Without these, political interest can coexist with a sense of powerlessness.

American psychologist Julian Rotter’s concept of locus of control offers one way to think about this. An internal locus of control means believing that your actions can influence outcomes; an external locus means seeing outcomes as largely determined by luck, fate, or powerful others. In simpler words, the more your locus of control is internal the more likely you are to take initiative. Applied to political participation, this raises an uncomfortable question: what are young people learning about the relationship between speaking up and being heard? If their experience repeatedly tells them that decisions are beyond their influence, withdrawing may begin to feel reasonable. We cannot keep telling young people to believe in their agency while giving them evidence that their actions do not matter.

Dismissive political language can reinforce precisely this feeling. There is a particular kind of hopelessness that comes from listening to those who are supposed to lead you. People can understand that governments face difficult choices, that fuel prices respond to international pressures, and that every problem cannot be solved immediately. What becomes harder to accept is being spoken to as though their suffering is an inconvenience and their questions an intrusion. When the defence of an expensive jet amounts to personal choice, or an announcement of further fuel price increases carries the attitude of what can you do about it?, the message people receive is that power owes them no explanation. These attitudes teach their own lesson about participation: you may speak, but those making the decisions do not have to listen.

The distinction between being invited to participate and actually having influence matters within political organisations too. Campaigning, attending rallies, and producing social media content can teach organising skills and build connections. But these activities do not automatically give younger members a say in candidate selection, party spending, or policy priorities. Nor does appointing a young office-holder necessarily broaden representation: someone from an established political family or influential patron enters politics with advantages unavailable to most contemporaries. The useful test is whether an ordinary member can understand how decisions are made, compete for responsibility, and question leadership without losing their place in the organisation. Age diversity is valuable, but the rules governing access to authority determine how much it changes.

Even the spaces created specifically for young people can reproduce these inequalities.

This is a criticism not just of government programmes but also of civil society initiatives that focus primarily on university students. In my experience working in the development sector, whenever the word ‘youth’ is added to a programme, it is often taken to mean ‘engagement with university students’. Young people working in shops, learning a trade, doing unpaid care work, or looking for employment become much harder to find in these conversations. A consultation held at a university on a weekday, advertised online, and conducted in English will select a particular constituency before the discussion begins. We then risk mistaking the views of those easiest to reach for the views of an entire generation. A useful example of a different approach is the Digital Democracy Initiative, implemented regionally by Accountability Lab Pakistan. Through small grants and support for locally led initiatives across South Asia, it creates opportunities for communities, including young people, to identify problems and develop practical responses. Such participation gives young people experience in identifying shared concerns and asking institutions to respond. The lesson is that democratic participation becomes more meaningful when young people have the resources and responsibility to shape an initiative themselves. 

So where do we begin? In schools and universities, students need regular opportunities to elect representatives and influence decisions that affect them. That means functioning student unions, clear election rules, safeguards against intimidation, and representation on committees dealing with fees, transport, and harassment. Administrations should be required to respond to student proposals within a published timeframe and explain decisions that go against them. A student does not need to win every argument to learn that participation matters. They need to see that raising an issue starts a process in which their concerns receive serious consideration.

Beyond campuses, local authorities could hold regular public meetings where young residents bring specific problems to the officials responsible for them. Each issue should leave the meeting with a named official, a response date, and a publicly accessible update. Political parties should publish how members can compete for positions and contribute to policy, while giving younger members actual responsibilities over decisions and resources. Leaders also need to answer questions about public spending and difficult policies without treating scrutiny as disrespect. The willingness to explain a decision is one of the most basic ways to show citizens that they have standing to question it.

Civil society needs to change whom it invites and what happens after the invitation. Youth programmes should recruit through vocational centres, workplaces, neighbourhood organisations, and rural networks alongside universities. Local-language discussions, travel support, and timings that accommodate work and care responsibilities would make participation possible for people our usual formats exclude. Before bringing young people into a consultation, organisers should be able to explain which decision they can influence, who will receive their recommendations, and when they will hear back. If nothing changes, participants deserve an explanation of that too.

The assumption behind Frederick’s experiment was that language would emerge without interaction. We make a similar assumption when we expect young people to become democratic citizens simply by reaching voting age. Participation takes practice. When these opportunities are missing from schools, universities, and political parties, young people have fewer chances to develop those skills or discover what collective action can achieve. Their willingness to participate depends partly on what previous attempts have taught them to expect. 

About the Author:

Momina Zahid  is Program Coordinator at Accountability Lab Pakistan and can be reached at  momina@accountabilitylab.org