Education, Democracy and Inequality by Bryony Hoskins & Jan Germen Janmaat

Author:Bryony Hoskins & Jan Germen Janmaat
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781137489760
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK

Levels of Political Engagement

How politically engaged are young adolescents in the six selected countries? We examine this by running a series of error plots. Such plots allow for a quick and insightful assessment of differences between groups in mean levels of the outcomes of interest. If the confidence intervals, as indicated by vertical bars, overlap, the mean values are not significantly different. If they do not overlap, they are. The error plot of Fig. 5.1, which is based on the pooled data of the six countries, shows that the level of political engagement very much depends on the form of participation. While many young people expect to vote in local and national elections when they become old enough to do so, few say they will engage in more formal forms beyond voting, such as joining a political party or standing as a candidate, and even fewer expect to be partaking in illegal forms of protest. Engaging in legal forms of protest is slightly more popular, but the gap of this mode of participation with voting is also very pronounced and highly significant (as indicated by the small confidence intervals). In general, the regularity seems to be that the more demanding and controversial the form of participation, the less young people expect to engage in it once they are adults. This is a pattern that is not dissimilar to that of the adult population (APSA Task Force 2004) and therefore should not surprise us.

Fig. 5.1Levels of political engagement in the pooled data of six European countries

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.