My recent work is concerned with civic literacy, the knowledge and skills required to make sense of the political world. Levels of civic literacy, i.e. the proportion of the population with such skills and knowledge, are low and declining, and there are significant differences between high and low civic literacy countries. The high civic literacy countries are especially those in Scandinavia and Northern Europe that engage in policies I term non-material redistribution, in such areas as adult education, communications, libraries, civic education, etc. These differences, it appears, prevail among the Internet generation, i.e. those 18-30, who grew up with the Internet, and among whom civic literacy is low. I am interested in innovations that reduce the proportion of political dropouts, hence I look in particular at the high civic-literacy countries. This is the subject of the substantial section of the paper. The question posed is thus: is low civic literacy a state of affairs that can be avoided or reversed. Does the Internet Generation’s apparently low level of political attentiveness foretell a continuing decline in civic literacy? If so, what if any examples do we see of innovations being developed and put in place by the high civic-literacy countries to meet this challenge.
