Good citizens and good Europeans? Comparing young people’s European identity and civic attitudes

This paper examines the effects of good citizenship norms on young people’s European identity. More specifically, it offers an empirical snapshot of how distinct citizenship norms, particularly, passive, duty-based and engaged norms, shape young people’s European belonging via multilevel modelling of the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study 2016 dataset (N= 52,758) using SPSS. The paper demonstrates that good citizenship norms, especially engaged and duty-based norms can explain stronger senses of European identity among young people. By comparison, passive norms emerge as negative and at best ambivalent predictors of this issue. These dynamics remain stable after socio-economic predictors at the individual (gender, migrant and socio-economic background) and country level factors (East/West regional location, migration integration policy and globalisation indexes) are introduced. However, norms of citizenship emerge as much less relevant once youth’s national identity is also controlled for. In this case, only the migration integration policy of countries emerges as exceptionally stable. The overall findings of the paper underscore that, concurrently, norms of good citizenship support young people’s European identity, broadly defined. However, the broader repercussions of the dynamism between their senses of European and national identities and norms of citizenship require further and urgent attention, especially due to the way the national identity layer seems to challenge the prevalence of norms of good citizenship at the European level.