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What makes up democracy? Meanings of democracy and their correlates among adolescents in 38 countries

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Abstract

Several studies investigate the meanings of democracy among the adult population. In contrast, less is known about young citizens’ ideas of democracy, and which individual and contextual characteristics are associated with them. This article contributes to the literature by uncovering the meanings of democracy and their correlates among adolescents in 38 countries. Using the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study 2009, the article shows that meanings of democracy vary among adolescents. These meanings are the results of how adolescents find various aspects of democracy, as the rule of law, freedoms, rights, pluralism, or equality, constitutive of it. Then, the article assesses whether socialization agents and personal characteristics account for the different meanings of democracy to adolescents. Finally, the analysis addresses the role that larger contexts—democratization and human development—have in the formation of concepts of democracy among adolescents.

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Fig. 1

Source: own elaboration of ICCS 2009

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Notes

  1. Unfortunately, with the available data it is not possible to test whether ideas of democracy among adolescents change over the life course.

  2. According to this reasoning, it should be born in mind that the link between information and meanings of democracy to adolescents might be endogenous, as adolescents with more complex ideas of democracy might be more prone to look for political information. Unfortunately, given the research design, we cannot address this issue.

  3. The list of countries is reported in the Supplementary materials.

  4. Descriptive statistics and detailed descriptions of the variables are reported in the Supplementary materials.

  5. While among the identified classes we can find three that be ordered (“limited”, “minimalist” and “complex”), we find also two (“free-speech” and “uncritical”) that cannot be fitted in an ordered scale. Do note that Latent Class Analysis finds groupings that are nominal, i.e. mutually exclusive classes with no natural order, thus presenting qualitative differences, rather quantitative ones. In this regard, Collins and Lanza (2010, p. 34) argue: “the subgroups revealed in LCA may not be ordered along a single quantitative dimension”. Nevertheless, in the Supplementary materials, multilevel ordinal models using the three orderable classes as dependent variable are presented. Results are comparable to those presented in this article, although they do not consider the additional two classes.

  6. Looking at this response category allows capture of a solid endorsement for the elements of democracy and better differentiation among the respondents, given that the majority agree or strongly agree with the statements. It should be clear that the analysis was carried out on the ordinal items.

  7. The coefficients of the model are reported in the Supplementary materials.

  8. In this regard, also ideology or political values might be relevant factors for meanings of democracy as citizens emphasize the role of some elements of this type or regime depending on their political and social views, as shown by research on the adult population (e.g. Carlin and Singer, 2011; Ceka and Magalhães 2016). Unfortunately, we cannot control for this aspect in this study.

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  1. Department of Social and Political Sciences, European University Institute, Via dei Roccettini, 9, 50014, San Domenico Di Fiesole, Italy

    Mario Quaranta

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Quaranta, M. What makes up democracy? Meanings of democracy and their correlates among adolescents in 38 countries. Acta Polit 55, 515–537 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41269-019-00129-4

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