Research has shown a consistent and persistent gender gap in political self-efficacy across western countries. Nevertheless, the regularity in these findings mask the diversity in the measures used to capture this construct and little reflection has been undertaken on the extent that changing the measures has on the size and the direction of the gender gap. This paper tests on students aged 14 across 38 countries using the IEA International Citizenship and Civic education Study, the extent that self-efficacy in the domain of politics is a unidimensional measure and if different gender gaps can be found between self-efficacy measures capturing partisan politics compared to broader citizenship self-efficacy measures. The findings show that it is only partisan political self-efficacy measures in which the word politics is emphasised where there is a significant gender gap and where girls are disadvantaged. This is the case for 37 out 38 countries. When a broader measure of citizenship self-efficacy is used there are much less gender differences and when there is a significant difference girls outperform boys in 14 out of 38 countries. These contrary findings are similar in the same study when comparing the measures on interest in politics and interest in social issues.

In response to various challenges facing liberal democracy, Western governments have turned to education in recent years as a tool to bolster the democratic dispositions of the new generation (Janmaat 2018). Although there is ample evidence from educationalists and political scientists that education and particularly civic education can foster such dispositions (i.e. knowledge, skills, values and behaviours) (Niemi and Junn 1998, Finkel 2002, Geboers et al 2013), so far no measure has been developed describing comprehensively how and to what degree a country’s educational policies and practices promote such dispositions. Such a measure would not only allow for an easy assessment of the democratic performance of a national education system but also for the identification of specific areas of improvement within it. As such it would be a highly useful tool for policy makers and practitioners interested in citizenship education.

Drawing on a recently started project funded by the Leverhulme Trust, we will explain, in this presentation, how we plan to develop such a measure. We label the measure the Education for Democracy Index (EfDI) and we will develop it for almost all European countries. We restrict ourselves to European countries in first instance as these are the countries for which the necessary data sources are available. The EfDI will consist of national level data on system characteristics and educational policies and practices. Unlike other policy indexes, such as the Migrant Integration Policy Index (MIPEX), it will also cover the implementation of policies and curricula in schools. Once it is constructed, we intend to relate it to national political and cultural traditions and to young people’s democratic dispositions.

The construction of the EfDI involves two stages: (1) the conceptual development of the index and (2) populating it with data. The first stage starts by drawing on the Reference-Framework-of-Competences-for-Democratic-Culture (RFCDC) of the Council of Europe (CoE) to identify the dispositions that ought to be fostered in liberal democracies. Once these dispositions have been selected, we will engage in an extensive review of the literature on the effect of education, in all its aspects, on these dispositions to identify relevant educational domains and indicators, with each domain comprising several indicators. Being highly familiar with the literature on civic learning, we can say from the onset that these domains are almost sure to cover educational attainment (Nie et al 1996; Hillygus 2005), the curriculum and course content (Galston 2001; Geboers et al 2013) and learning-by-doing pedagogies (Sfard 1998; Torney Purta 2002; Hoskins and Janmaat 2019).

The second stage will involve drawing on relevant data sources to populate the index with data. Such sources include UNESCO and OECD data on educational attainment and other system characteristics, Eurydice reports on citizenship education and IEA-ICCS studies (notably the teacher surveys) for data on practices in schools. These sources make it possible to construct the EfDI for several points in time. We will present the index on a designated website.

Political trust is commonly regarded as a rational, knowledge-based evaluation of the political system’s trustworthiness. However, this approach neglects the affective nature of political trust, shaped by feelings of belonging and emotions such as pride, hope, and fear towards the political system. Whilst it is argued that affective political trust is developed early in life through socialization and therefore a rather stable attitude; rational political trust is updated more regularly based on current institutional performance and therefore more volatile. Both approaches offer fundamental insights into the concept of political trust. Given that adolescence is the critical age where political trust attitudes are formed, this study examines the empirical evidence of the rational and affective conception of political trust among 14-year-olds across various national contexts. Following a comparative approach, it draws upon data from 30 countries from two waves of the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS), conducted in 2009 and 2016. To examine the rational nature of political trust, we investigate the extent to which political trust is a coherent, object-specific (i.e., distinguishing between order and representative institutions), domain-specific (i.e., distinct from trust in non-political domains, such as trust in people), and knowledge-based judgement that aligns with the country’s institutional trustworthiness. To examine the affective nature of political trust, we investigate the extent to which political trust relates to feelings of pride and attachment to the political system. Analyses are performed within a (multilevel) structural equation modelling framework and include measurement and structural invariance tests. To examine how contextual characteristics might explain the extent to which adolescents’ political trust is rational or affective also country-level covariates (i.e., corruption and human development levels) are included. Preliminary analyses show that political trust is more object- and domain-specific among established democracies compared to new democracies. Further interaction analyses indicate that political trust is more affective (i.e., related more strongly and positively to feelings of national attachment) with growing corruption levels. Finally, we find that corruption levels moderate the relationship between student’s civic knowledge and their political trust, that is positive associations are found in countries with lower levels of public sector corruption whereas negative associations are found in countries with higher corruption levels. The discussion focusses on how these findings contribute to political socialization and citizenship education research.

To safeguard democracy, future citizens must be knowledgeable about civic structures and participate, but they also must be tolerant to answer thoughtfully in front of discrimination, such as sexism or racism (Kennedy, 2019).

Attitudes are at the base of behaviours and social identity because they are a person’s understanding of the social contract (Allen et al., 2016). As Allen and colleagues (2016) indicate, “the formation of attitudes about political issues such as poverty, defense, or even the meaning of citizenship is at the core of development of citizenship and its related knowledge and behaviors” (p. 3.)

Thus, attitudes toward other groups are critical to citizenship in democratic societies (Isac et al., 2018; Kennedy, 2019). They are related to guaranteeing other social groups' democratic and political rights, contributing to political tolerance (Isac et al., 2018)

Evidence suggests that attitudes that oppose equal rights between men and women are negatively related to gender equality (Brandt, 2011). Moreover, these attitudes may reproduce stereotypes among youth that limit young women’s opportunities and lead to risky behaviours, especially among young men (Varela et al., 2022). However, knowledge about adherence to gender attitudes among adolescents is still scarce in Latin America.

This paper seeks to identify profiles of adherence to attitudes toward gender equity across five Latin American countries: Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Peru. To do that, we used a Simultaneous Latent Class Analysis across Groups, a technique that allows us to compare contexts by restricting the model and making it structurally equivalent (Kankaras & Vermunt, 2014). We used data from the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) 2016 (Schulz et al., 2018) conducted by the IEA. Specifically, we used the Students’ endorsement of gender equality scale from this study.

We identified four different profiles based on the items included in the analysis, with varying prevalence levels in every country analysed. These profiles are fully egalitarians, normative sexists, hesitant egalitarians, and political sexists.

This paper’s relevance lies on the idea that active citizens need understanding concepts, principles, and skills to be responsible and thoughtful but also committed to democratic values. In this scenario, it is essential to understand the current state of adherence to gender equity to construct fairer and more inclusive societies.

The centrality of Global Citizenship Education (GCE) in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) seemed to carry a promise of more ethical engagements with global issues in practice (Sund & Pashby, 2018). Nevertheless, GCE in secondary schools in Europe, and other western contexts, remains largely delivered by ahistorical, apolitical and superficial activities that emphasise the importance of including multiple perspectives, but never challenge the Eurocentric one (Eriksen, 2018). It is therefore with enthusiasm that we receive the new European Declaration on Global Education to 2050 (GENE, 2022), which explicitly states GCE must address the historical context of our present global issues, “including the legacies of colonialism” (p. 4); and make room for the vast plurality of knowledges available globally, including those that have been historically marginalised (p. 5). This is a welcomed change in official discourse about GCE in Europe, which we read as calling for a shift to pluriversal approaches to GCE – engagements with global issues that take up coloniality – the global systems of oppression ignited with colonialism (e.g. racism, capitalism, sexism) (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018), and decenter Eurocentric ways of knowing and being so that other perspectives can be made visible and engaged with (rather than assimilated within the Eurocentrism) (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018).  

In this comparative study, we take stock of literature about GCE in secondary schools in Italy and Portugal and examine the extent to which GCE in these countries already responds/can respond to the European Declaration’s call to take up colonial legacies and promote pluriversality. Portugal and Italy offer an interesting context for this work because, despite their current socio-political differences, the countries share a colonial past but a very different level of acknowledgement of their colonial past. They were both key actors in driving and sustaining coloniality, whilst then being intramurally excluded within Europe by ‘purer nations’ (Mignolo, 2021). Starting with data collected within a wider European project called Global Education and Learning (GEL) (Tarozzi, 2023), we narrowed the sample to include only articles related to secondary education in Italy and Portugal, ending up with a sample of 20 Italian and 17 Portuguese articles. We developed a thematic analysis of the data that drew on Sharon Stein’s (2015) typology of global citizenship as a heuristic model. Stein (2015) identifies four positions from where global citizenship is approached in education: entrepreneurial, liberal-humanist, anti-oppressive, and incommensurable. We found Stein’s typology (Stein, 2015) particularly helpful to the study because it maps not only the more traditional engagements with GCE (i.e., entrepreneurial, and liberal humanist), but also makes room for approaches that gesture towards pluriversality (Pashby et al., 2020). We report on key findings from the study, drawing commonalities and specificities across Italy and Portugal that will support work in the field in these and other European countries, and contribute to emerging decolonial scholarship about GCE in Europe (e.g. Eriksen, 2018; Pashby & Sund, 2020).