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A Tree Must be Bent While it is Young: Political Knowledge Gaps in Early Childhood

Gender
Knowledge
Political Sociology
Analytic
Quantitative
Regression
Markus Tausendpfund
FernUniversität in Hagen
Simone Abendschön
Justus-Liebig-University Giessen
Markus Tausendpfund
FernUniversität in Hagen

Abstract

The discussion of political knowledge and potential inequalities concentrates almost exclusively on adults’ (lack of) political knowledge and the role that resources play in this regard. As important as such analyses are, they neglect in our view that an individual’s political knowledge is acquired through political socialization and learning processes which already start in childhood. With our paper, we’d therefore like to introduce a childhood perspective on the topic of resource-based political knowledge gaps. We’d like to investigate if, how and why political knowledge varies between young children in primary school. The empirical analyses draw on panel data of the German project “Learning to Live Democracy”. The study includes a three-wave panel of about 750 young children which were interviewed at the beginning and at the end of their first school year as well as at the end of the forth school year. The children were questioned with a specially developed standardized questionnaire that included items regarding their political knowledge, political and social orientations as well as their recreational activities. The empirical analysis is separated into two sections. First, we investigate the development of political knowledge over time. Here, the empirical results show that political knowledge among young children is not equally distributed. Girls, children from Turkish families or from areas with a low socio-economic status show less political knowledge than boys, children from native German families or from areas with a higher socio-economic status. These differences do not disappear during the first years in school. Apparently, school attendance does not offer compensation for the initial inequalities. In a second step, we will investigate these differences in more detail. More specifically, we analyze determinants of children’s political knowledge by looking at individual and contextual characteristics using multi-level modeling.