Democratic civic engagement of adolescents in three divided societies: Northern Ireland, South Africa, and the United States

ABSTRACT

This study examines how socio-political divisions–particularly race/ethnicity and religion–were related to democratic civic engagement (DCE) in three divided societies: Northern Ireland (NI), South Africa (SA), and the United States (US). Adolescents exposed to well-evaluated, parallel civics curricula reported significantly greater civic engagement in SA than in the US; those in the US reported significantly greater engagement than those in NI. Within NI, Protestants and Catholics did not report different engagement levels; in SA, black and coloured groups expressed greater civic engagement than whites; in the US, white students expressed greater civic engagement than those from more marginalised groups. Analyses of aspects of DCE led us to conclude that varied social and political realities, histories, legacies of division, and power dynamics helped explain these results. Understanding such societal forces is critical for educators who seek to promote youth to become thoughtful and ethical civic actors.

KEYWORDS:

• Socio-political divisions
• race/ethnicity
• religion
• cross-country comparison
• democratic civic engagement

Acknowledgments

We thank the Spencer Foundation for supporting this work, especially Diana Hess and Lauren Jones Young. We also thank the University of California Berkeley and Facing History and Ourselves for many contributions. Our research collaborators—Tony Gallagher, Sean Pettis, and Gavin Duffy in Northern Ireland and Gail Weldon and Dylan Wray in South Africa—helped design and administer the surveys. Research assistants included Brielle Leonard, Zina Besirevič, Paul Lai, and Logan Manning. Caroline Kerfoot and Gail Weldon gave many helpful suggestions, both editorial and substantive. Judith Torney-Purta and Colette Daiute provided insightful comments on more than one draft. Finally, Ingram Olkin guided the statistical analysis and taught us more than we can say. To his memory, we dedicate this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. We use the word ‘citizens’ to refer to those who reside in and attend school in the three countries, regardless of whether they meet a legal definition of citizenship (also see Haste 2010).

2. This is not a primarily religious conflict; however, our subjects, and the Department of Education in their school categorisations, use the shorthand of Catholic/Protestant. We also use this shorthand.

3. In the analysis, we dropped students who identified as ‘other’ because the number (29) was too small to provide statistically meaningful information.

4. Following South African usage, the term ‘coloured’ refers to a person with a mixed ancestry from more than one of the South African racial/ethnic common classifications.

5. In future surveys, it would be important to broaden gender labels and provide an ‘other’ category.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Spencer Foundation [201000118,201400109].