The long-lasting effects of citizenship education

Abstract

Both policymakers and scholars disagree about the effects and suitability of citizenship education standalone courses. Extant evidence about their effects is mixed and inconclusive. This article exploits the discontinuities generated by changes in Spanish education policies to identify the long-term effects of civic education on multiple outputs usually set as the policy goals of these courses: political engagement, institutional support and political values. In 2007, a new standalone citizenship education subject was introduced in the Spanish school curricula. This subject was then progressively removed from the curricula until its disappearance in 2017. These changes gave rise to exogenous variation in exposure to civic education between young individuals born in different years. In this article these policy changes are exploited to identify the effects of citizenship education through a regression discontinuity design that draws on a 12-wave panel survey. The results point to the emergence of a generation of critical – yet passive – citizens as a result of the implementation of a standalone citizenship education subject in Spanish schools.

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2021.1917153 .

KEYWORDS :

• Civic education
• citizenship education
• political engagement
• institutional support
• political values
• regression discontinuity design

Acknowledgments

We thank Juan Pérez-Rajó for his valuable help in collecting information about the implementation of Citizenship Education in Spain. We are also grateful to Macarena Ares, the editors and anonymous reviewers of West European Politics, and participants at the 2019 ECPR General Conference for helpful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) has assessed the different approaches to CE. In its last study, ‘International Civic and Citizenship Education Study 2009’ it distinguishes between a) CE taught as a separate subject, b) CE taught as a subject related to human and social sciences, c) as a competence or content integrated in all subjects taught at school, d) as an extra-curricular activity, e) as an outcome of school experience as a whole, and f) it is not part of the school curriculum.

2 The exception to this pattern was the region of Castilla la Mancha. Although governed by PSOE, in this region EdC was first taught during the 2008–2009 school year.

3 This identification strategy has been used to assess the effects of education reforms on voting (Lindgren et al. 2019), as well as the effects of CE policies on political interest (Prior 2018).

4 To calculate the running variable, respondents are assigned to the region where they currently live. A limitation of this operationalization is that respondents might not be currently living in the same region where they attended school. However, we consider this to be unlikely given the low rates of interregional mobility in Spain (Maza and Villaverde 2004).

5 That is, Di = 1 if xi ≥ 0 and Di = 0 if xi < 0.

6 The estimation is based on the rdrobust Stata package developed by Cattaneo et al. (2019).

7 In Spain CE was implemented in both primary and secondary schools. However, our sample only includes individuals born before 2003. As a consequence, our sample only includes 74 respondents who studied EdC in primary school (and 73 of those also studied EdC in secondary school).

8 Further details about the survey and its sampling procedures can be found in Online appendix B.

9 Further details on the wording of survey questions and the distribution of all the variables can be found in Online appendix C.

10 In all figures solid lines are first order (linear) polynomials fitted separately on the common bandwidths at each side of the threshold. Dots represent bin averages of the outcome variable. The number and size of bins are selected through the mimicking variance evenly-spaced method. Note that the polynomials are fitted using the original observations (raw data), not the binned ones.

11 Tony Venables for Bundeszenttrale für politische Bildung (12/12/2018) states: ‘From reading the academic literature about European citizenship education […], the way citizenship education is articulated appears less nationalistic and gives more scope to universal values and critical thinking’. According to this approach, what we find in Spain is actually consistent with a general European trend in CE.

Additional information

Funding

This research has received financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities through the research grant CSO2017-83086-R.

Notes on contributors

Enrique Hernández

Enrique Hernández is a Juan de la Cierva postdoctoral fellow at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. His research interests include political attitudes, public opinion, and political behaviour. He has published in European Political Science Review, European Journal of Political Research and Political Analysis, amongst others. [[email protected]]

Carol Galais

Carol Galais is a Ramón y Cajal postdoctoral fellow at the Public Law and Political Science Department at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Her research interests include political socialisation, public opinion and political participation. Her work has appeared in European Journal of Political Research, The International Journal of Press/Politics, Electoral Studies and International Journal of Public Opinion Research, amongst others. [[email protected]]