Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-r5fsc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T05:15:00.004Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Does Deliberative Education Increase Civic Competence? Results from a Field Experiment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 October 2019

Mikael Persson Open the ORCID record for Mikael Persson [Opens in a new window] ,
Klas Andersson ,
Pär Zetterberg ,
Joakim Ekman  and
Simon Lundin
Mikael Persson
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden, e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]
Klas Andersson
Affiliation:
Department of Education and Special Education, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden, e-mail: [email protected]
Pär Zetterberg
Affiliation:
Department of Government, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden, e-mail: [email protected]
Joakim Ekman
Affiliation:
School of Social Sciences, Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden, e-mail: [email protected]
Simon Lundin
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden, e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

How should education be structured to most effectively increase civic outcomes such as political knowledge and democratic values? We present results from a field experiment in which we compare the effects of deliberative education and traditional teacher-centered education. The study is the largest field experiment on deliberative education to date and involved more than 1,200 students in 59 classrooms. We test the effects on four forms of civic competence: political knowledge, political interest, democratic values, and political discussion. In contrast to previous research, we find little evidence that deliberative education significantly increases civic competence.

Keywords

Field experimenteducationdeliberationpolitical knowledgepolitical interestpolitical discussiondemocratic valuesteachingclassroom climatecivics
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Experimental Political Science , Volume 7 , Issue 3 , Winter 2020 , pp. 199 - 208
Copyright
© The Experimental Research Section of the American Political Science Association 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

We gratefully acknowledge the support of a grant from the Swedish Research Council. We thank Moa Frödin Gruneau, Alexander Ryan and Pär Åberg for research assistance. We would like to thank Pradeep Chhibber, Love Christensen, David Doherty, Don Green, Kaisa Maria Herne, James Fishkin, Valérie-Anne Mahéo-Le Luel, Lies Maurissen as well as conference and workshop participants at MPSA 2018, APSA 2018, the Barcelona-Gothenburg-Bergen Workshop on Experimental Political Science in Barcelona 2018, and Uppsala University 2017. The data, code, and any additional materials required to replicate all analyses in this article are available at the Journal of Experimental Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at: doi: 10.7910/DVN/UMRAM7 (Persson et al., 2019).

References

Andersson, Klas. 2015. Deliberative teaching: Effects on students’ democratic virtues. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research 59(5): 604–622.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bogaards, Matthijs and Deutsch, Franziska. 2015. Deliberation by, with, and for University Students. Journal of Political Science Education 11(2): 221–232.Google Scholar
Campbell, David E. 2008. Voice in the classroom: How an open classroom climate fosters political engagement among adolescents. Political Behavior 30(4): 437–454.Google Scholar
Carpini, Michael X. Delli and Keeter, Scott. 1996. What Americans know about Politics and why it Matters. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Dahl, Robert Alan. 1989. Democracy and its Critics. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Deslauriers, Louis, Schelew, Ellen and Wieman, Carl. 2011. Improved learning in a large-enrollment physics class. Science 332(6031): 862–864.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ekman, Joakim and Amnå, Erik. 2012. Political participation and civic engagement: Towards a new typology. Human Affairs 22(3): 283–300.Google Scholar
Englund, Tomas. 2000. Rethinking democracy and education: Towards an education of deliberative citizens. Journal of Curriculum Studies 32(2): 305–313.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gerber, Alan S. and Green, Donald P.. 2012. Field Experiments: Design, Analysis, and Interpretation. WW Norton.Google Scholar
Green, Donald P. and Vavreck, Lynn. 2007. Analysis of cluster-randomized experiments: A comparison of alternative estimation approaches. Political Analysis 16(2): 138–152.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Green, Donald P., Aronow, Peter M., Bergan, Daniel E., Greene, Pamela, Paris, Celia and Weinberger, Beth I.. 2011. Does knowledge of constitutional principles increase support for civil liberties? Results from a randomized field experiment. The Journal of Politics 73(2): 463–476.Google Scholar
Gutmann, Amy. 1999. Democratic Education. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hess, Diana E. and McAvoy, Paula. 2014. The Political Classroom: Evidence and Ethics in Democratic Education. Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heß, Simon. 2017. Randomization inference with Stata: A guide and software. The Stata Journal 17(3): 630–651.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kahne, Joseph, Crow, David and Lee, Nam-Jin. 2013. Different pedagogy, different politics: High school learning opportunities and youth political engagement. Political Psychology 34(3): 419–441.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Latimer, Christopher and Hempson, Karen M.. 2012. Using deliberation in the classroom: A teaching pedagogy to enhance student knowledge, opinion formation, and civic engagement. Journal of Political Science Education 8(4): 372–388.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lin, Winston. 2013. Agnostic notes on regression adjustments to experimental data: Reexamining Freedman’s critique. The Annals of Applied Statistics 7(1): 295–318.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lindgren, Karl-Oskar, Oskarsson, Sven and Persson, Mikael. 2019. Enhancing electoral equality: can education compensate for family background differences in voting participation?” American Political Science Review 113(1): 108–122.Google Scholar
Neundorf, Anja, Niemi, Richard G. and Smets, Kaat. 2016. The compensation effect of civic education on political engagement: how civics classes make up for missing parental socialization. Political Behavior 38(4): 921–949.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nie, Norman H., Junn, Jane and Stehlik-Barry, Kenneth. 1996. Education and Democratic Citizenship in America. University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Persson, Mikael. 2015a. Classroom climate and political learning: Findings from a Swedish panel study and comparative data. Political Psychology 36(5): 587–601.Google Scholar
Persson, Mikael. 2015b. Education and political participation. British Journal of Political Science 45(3): 689–703.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Persson, Mikael, Andersson, Klas, Zetterberg, Pär, Ekman, Joakim and Lundin, Simon. 2019. Replication data for: Does deliberative education increase civic competence? Results from a field experiment. Harvard Dataverse, V1. doi: 10.7910/DVN/UMRAM7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sumaktoyo, Nathanael Gratias, Nickerson, David W and Keane, Michael J.. 2016. Discussion group composition and deliberation experience. Journal of Experimental Political Science 3(2): 164–173.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Torney-Purta, Judith. 2002a. Patterns in the civic knowledge, engagement, and attitudes of European adolescents: The IEA Civic Education Study. European Journal of Education 37(2): 129–141.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Torney-Purta, Judith. 2002b. The school’s role in developing civic engagement: A study of adolescents in twenty-eight countries. Applied Developmental Science 6(4): 203–212.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: PDF

Persson et al. supplementary material

Persson et al. supplementary material

Download Persson et al. supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 23.1 MB
Supplementary material: Link

Persson Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/UMRAM7
Link