Sources of Civic Education

SURVEY Q31-55:

“In the list below are some issues I would like you to look at.

Please consider each issue separately and carefully. Rate to what extent you care about each issue.

The values you can give are 1 (not at all), 2 (only a little), 3 (somewhat), 4 (quite), 5 (very much)”

Issues ranked by average

In order to probe further into our respondents’ levels of global awareness, part of the large survey (Q62-66) comprised a brief quiz on general knowledge of five international news stories and related facts. The first three questions were based on two global news

items that were in the headlines of the UK news media for several weeks/months: the Beslan school siege by Chechen terrorists that took place on 1 September 2004, i.e.

about two months before the survey; and a series of lethal hurricanes in the US that took place earlier that year. While both are international events, moderate reception of UK news via any medium is likely to have led to familiarity with those stories.

The other two questions referred to basic facts relating to two major global institutions (the European Union and the Olympic Games); once again, the working hypothesis was that any viewer/listener/reader/user with a minimum of regular news consumption and attention span would be familiar with those facts, given that Britain is a member of the EU and especially as ten new countries had just joined the Union earlier that year

(bringing the total number of member states to 25), and given also that the 2004 Olympic Games had just taken place in Athens, which meant that the 2008 Beijing Olympics were in the headlines. Therefore it was assumed that the answers to those two questions would have been mentioned regularly in the headlines and in the news.

The fact that the survey took part in a department of media studies, with some of the participants being journalism students, raised the bar of expected awareness, in the sense that if it was found that media and journalism students were unaware of these global affairs, then that would have been cause for concern regarding global awareness amongst young people in Britain at large. As a caveat to the adopted approach, It is should be acknowledged that there are different ways of assessing awareness of current affairs. For instance, the rise of search engines, Web 2.0 and user-generated content has been changing the way internet users – especially those of younger generations – access news. This emerging online news and research culture may favour skills such as the quick retrieval and more superficial cognitive processing of information from different websites, as opposed to in-depth memorising.

Having this in mind, the results support the hypothesis that the young people sampled were broadly knowledgeable of global affairs and international stories (Figure K6). Nine out of ten respondents got the “country” of the Beslan crisis correctly, while in the most challenging of the five questions, that of the number of casualties, the correct answer (301-600: 32.6%) closely followed the most popular one (101-300: 44.4%; which is itself not far from the approximate number of casualties). The majority of respondents got the name of the US hurricane right (59.4%), while 69% got the 2008 Olympic city correctly (Beijing).

Interestingly, the only aberration to these results was in regards to the question of the number of EU member states: only just above a quarter (28.5%) of respondents got the number right; an equal 28.5% thought that there are 20 members in the EU (which has never been the case); one-third (32.5%) of the sample thought that the European Union comprises of 15 member states (which was the case from 1995 until early 2004); while the remaining 10.5% thought that there are 12 member states (which was true in 1986-1995).

Despite this outlier, the evidence does suggest that these young people are both interested in, and knowledgeable of, a variety of issues, policy areas and public affairs,

including global ones. However, issue interest and political knowledge are only two of the tools that political scientists usually employ to explore youth civic attitudes. We also need to take into account a crucial third factor, which is political sophistication – an essential part of a citizen’s civic profile, albeit a concept that has evolved through the decades amidst heated scholarly debates (Denny and Doyle 2008). Pattie, Seyd and Whiteley (2004: 139) note that according to cognitive engagement theory, “cognitive mobilisation produces individuals who have an interest in politics and civic affairs, are politically knowledgeable and have a clear understanding of the norms and principles of democracy”.

4.4 Issue Cognition and Political Sophistication

The exact definition and components of political sophistication have been the subject of many interesting contributions to the field of political science and political psychology over the last fifty years, especially since Converse’s (1964) model of political

conceptualisation (see Lawrence 2003). Alternative terms include “political expertise”,

“cognitive complexity” and “cognitive engagement” (see Luskin and Bullock 2004).

Without getting into an in-depth semantic debate which is not part of this study’s agenda, it is important to distinguish political sophistication from political awareness (i.e.

information or knowledge) and political interest (i.e. affective relationship to an issue or cause). Put simply, political sophistication is essentially about the degree to which a citizen understands the workings of politics and government and is able to build coherent cognitive links amongst a variety of factors such as political events, pieces of information, news, values, policy stances and party choices.

For the purposes of this study, we borrow elements from Neuman (1986) and Luskin (1987) and focus on the aspect of political sophistication that concerns a citizen’s ability to connect seemingly unrelated but politically interdependent issues between them; or to understand the links between policies or public affairs that are often articulated in

abstract terms or in ways that do not relate to that citizen’s everyday life. It should be noted that this specific aspect of political sophistication (for which we use the term issue cognition) is similar but not identical to the sophistication-interaction theory of mass policy reasoning, which argues that the levels of political sophistication determine the ways in which individuals “translate” their abstract values and ideologies to specific policy preferences, and which some criticise for lack of reliability (Goren 2004).

The discussion of issue cognition and political sophistication which follows draws on three types of data analysis:

- an hierarchical cluster analysis (see Figure 5)

- non-parametric correlations of all possible pairs of issues (Table K3) - a comparison of the mean score of each issue (Figure 4).

The analysis of the data produced strong evidence confirming the political sophistication hypothesis, i.e. direct links were drawn by the young people in our study amongst policy areas that were assumed to be related or interdependent, and between macro-social affairs and micro-social issues. Hence, the respondents demonstrated a high degree of

political sophistication and consistency in their responses. That is not to say that

respondents cared equally about the issues within each cluster, but simply that there is a clear pattern in the data across the sample indicating a consistent response to those clustered issues. The twenty-five issues and affairs were listed randomly in the actual survey, yet a mere glance at the dendrogram, which was produced directly by the software without any researcher input regarding the expected associations or the order of the issues, shows visible clusters of related and interdependent issues (highlighted in Figure 5).

FIGURE 5: HIERARCHICAL CLUSTER ANALYSIS – ISSUES AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS