Young people`s competencies to be enhanced by political resp. citizenship education in order to enable them to take part in society as active citizens, have been vividly discussed by the scientific community for some years now. While the specific way of integrating political knowledge into theoretic models of competency is controversially debated (Weißeno et al. 2010; Sander 2010), its relevance is generally accepted. In spite of its widely accepted salience, the empirical investigation of political knowledge is less developed than one might expect, also due to measurement difficulties (Luskin 1989 & 2002; Delli Carpini & Keeter 1993 & 1996; Martin et al. 1993). The study presented here focuses on political knowledge of German secondary school pupils (N = 609) in two different grades, looking at both their objective and subjective (perceived, self-evaluated) knowledge with regard to the European Union (EU). The potential influence of various predicators on both types of knowledge is being looked at and controlled for, among which gender, cultural capital, migration background, news consumption in different media, class climate and attitudes towards the EU. Furthermore, the design of the study allows to investigate whether some factors systematically influence the relation between objective and subjective political knowledge – in other words, whether members of certain subgroups evaluate their individual EU-knowledge differently. Among other implications, this would put the adequacy of self-reported knowledge as a proxy-indicator for objective political knowledge into question. Honouring the fact that a person`s political knowledge is a trait which cannot be directly observed, the study chooses a latent modelling approach, measuring political EU-knowledge on the basis of 27 multiple-choice-items and subjective EU-knowledge by means of a 5-item-battery. Using the software Mplus, latent correlations, latent regressions and latent path models were calculated for both types of knowledge, revealing interesting results.
