Conference Program

Education research has extensively documented the economic returns of schooling, particularly regarding employment, income, and labour market opportunities (Checchi, 2006; Ballarino et al., 2016; Pensiero et al., 2019). By contrast, less attention has been paid to its non-market returns, especially its contribution to promoting civic and political participation, associational involvement, and democratic orientations (Campbell, 2006; Assirelli, 2014; Sciolla, 2019). In line with the debate on educational poverty, this study interprets educational deprivation not merely as low educational attainment or a deficit in economically valuable skills (Giancola and Salmieri, 2023), but as a constraint on the resources required for active and informed citizenship.

Within this perspective, three main theoretical frameworks are highlighted. The first conceptualises education as a mechanism of intergenerational reproduction of social and cultural inequalities (Bourdieu, 1972), whereby social origin continues to exert a strong influence on access to, persistence in, and success within educational trajectories, contributing to the transmission of both resources and disadvantages across generations. The second concerns the effects of low educational attainment, which extend beyond disadvantaged labour market outcomes (Giancola & Salmieri, 2022) to include the civic and political domains: lower levels of education are associated with weaker participatory skills, lower levels of institutional trust, and less tolerant attitudes toward others. Finally, the third refers to the capability approach (Sen, 1985), which frames education as a resource. The effectiveness of this resource depends on the extent to which educational credentials can be converted into real opportunities for agency.

This study aims to analyse the joint role of social origin and educational attainment in shaping multiple dimensions of civicness, considering social origin both as a factor influencing educational trajectories and as a resource exerting a direct and indirect education-mediated effect on civic participation and orientations. Empirically, the study relies on data from the last four waves (2012, 2016, 2018, and 2020) of the European Social Survey (ESS) and examines the impact of education on selected dimensions of civicness identified by Campbell (2006) and further developed by Assirelli (2014): political engagement, interpersonal and institutional trust, and tolerance towards minorities.

The methodological strategy combines two complementary analytical strategies. First, a compositional descriptive approach explores the interactions between social origin, education, and civicness through Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) and Cluster Analysis (CA), providing a structured representation of the distribution of civic resources. Second, an exploratory-confirmatory approach based on multivariate linear models estimates the direct and indirect effects of the variables considered, controlling for key sociodemographic characteristics. The findings highlight the pivotal role of education in shaping civic inequalities. While educational attainment strongly shapes patterns of active citizenship, social origin still exerts an independent influence, operating both through educational pathways and directly. These findings underscore the persistence of inequality reproduction mechanisms within the civic sphere.