The rise of engaged citizenship: The evolution of citizenship norms among adolescents in 21 countries between 1999 and 2009

Abstract

Various authors claim that citizenship norms are changing rapidly in advanced democracies, leading to a stronger emphasis on self-expressive engagement and a decline of notions of civic duty. In this article, we compare results from two comparative surveys of adolescents: the 1999 Civic Education Study and the 2009 International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS). By using latent class analysis, we identify duty-based and engaged citizenship norms, both in 1999 and in 2009. As expected, the group supporting duty-based citizenship norms is clearly smaller in 2009 than in 1999, while the opposite is true for the group supporting engaged citizenship norms. In contrast to expectations, the empirical evidence also distinguishes additional normative concepts and shows that the distribution among countries is not according to the dynamics on value change as suggested in the literature, including a decline in engaged norms in Scandinavia and Western Europe.