In search of a democratic equalizer: the differential effects of three kinds of citizenship education on inequalities in internal political efficacy

Inequality in political participation is a democratic challenge undermining the input legitimacy of our representative political systems. People from a marginalized socioeconomic background participate less in politics, which causes an underrepresentation of their interests. Furthermore, their position in society is often transmitted from generation to generation, causing a generation-long political underrepresentation. We study the reproduction of these inequalities by looking into students’ political home situations. We argue that a stimulating political home environment contributes to a child’s political socialization process. Since we study this with data from Flemish senior high school students, we focus on their feelings of internal political efficacy as they do not yet have voting rights and are not yet considered citizens with full political rights. Internal political efficacy is a good predictor of their future political behavior and fits well within Bourdieu and Passeron’s general reproduction theory since it taps into feelings of political entitlement. As in all inequality debates, schools are often proposed as a holy grail to compensate for these inequalities. Tackling the imminent democratic challenges facing Western democracies today, citizenship education is encouraged to cultivate a new generation of active and democratic citizens. This citizenship education can, however, take on many different forms. In this paper, we research the moderating potential of citizenship education to compensate for the lack of a stimulating political home environment regarding internal political efficacy. We examine three distinct kinds of citizenship education: civic learning experiences in the classroom, an open classroom climate for discussion, and active student participation in school. We study potential moderating effects in the twelfth grade in Flanders with data collected in 2016 to test the attainment targets of citizenship education. We conduct three kinds of two-way interactions in a multilevel model—one for each kind of citizenship education.