In recent years, numerous countries and education systems have stepped up their efforts with regard to civic education, especially among adolescents. It is hoped that an increased emphasis on civic education will lead to more civic engagement and higher levels of political knowledge and political participation among young citizens. Indeed, some studies have shown that experiences with civic education can have significant and persistent effects, e.g., on political knowledge (Niemi & Junn, 1998). Other studies have shown that experiences with community service at school are associated with an increased willingness to participate in civic engagement, even after one has left the school (Metz & Youniss, 2003). These studies, however, are characterized by two limitations. First, they only contain information on the United States education system, which could imply that findings cannot be generalized. Second, there were based on relatively small samples. In the current research paper, our aim is to overcome these two limitations. Therefore our analysis is based on the results of the new ‘International Civic and Citizenship Education Study’ (ICCS 2009), that was conducted in 2009, in 38 different countries (n= ca. 43,000). The study aims to evaluate the effects of various interventions with regard to civic education (http://www.iea.nl/icces.html). This new dataset has not yet been used in political science. ICCS can be considered as a high quality comparative dataset, as intense care has been given to ensure the comparability of data across societies. This large and comprehensive dataset allows us to investigate the effects of civic education experiences on 14 year old adolescents in 38 different societies. As dependent variables, we will include: political sophistication, political trust and willingness to participate in political life. The dataset allows us to investigate whether these attitudes are determined primordially by the experiences adolescents have with civic education efforts at school, or rather with the political culture that is predominant within their country. By taking both elements into account, we hope to demonstrate, not only the effectiveness of civic education effort, but also to shed more light on the question how political attitudes are transmitted from one generation to another.
