Good Citizenship Tested: Gender Attitudes and Democratic Norms Among Young Europeans

There is increasing attention paid to how citizens respond to threats to democracy and what this means for their norms of good citizenship and civic values. These contributions engage directly with both the perils and promise of liberal democracy, often underlining an urgent need to revisit the relationship between norms of good citizenship, political behaviour, and senses of belonging. However, we seem to know little about how young people's citizenship and conceptions of their role as good citizens change in both liberal and, in the case of Europe at least increasingly illiberal and conservative contexts. Given the centrality of gender equality to liberal democratic norms, the paper places gender-related attitudes at the centre of its analysis of young people’s norms of good citizenship. Against this backdrop, this paper builds a model of ‘good’ European citizenship among young people, applying structural equation modelling to the European segment of the 2022 International Civic and Citizenship Education Study dataset via R. Specifically, the paper examines the relationship between the different norms of young people’s good citizenship, including duty-based, engaged, and passive norms, senses of European belonging, and preferred avenues for political engagement in the light of their gender-based attitudes (e.g. support for equality based on gender). Examining how young people conceive of ‘good’ citizenship and express themselves through civic and political engagement in this way will have important implications for current debates about the outlook of democratic citizenship in Europe going forward.