Political self-efficacy, the civic duty to vote, and a homogeneous political atmosphere have been identified as important antecedents of turnout. However, little is known about how they explain voting behavior among minorities, who have an inherent motivation to protect their minority rights. In this article, I examine how belonging to a minority, political self-efficacy, the civic duty to vote, and a shared party identification are connected to intentions to vote. Analyzing nationally representative panel data in a structural equation model, I compare Swedish-speaking minority adolescents and Finnish-speaking majority adolescents—groups that mainly share similar background characteristics in all but language and their minority or majority status. According to the results, the significantly higher voting intentions found among the minority can partly be derived from their higher level of political self-efficacy. The unilingually Swedish-speaking adolescents also seem to benefit from their more pronounced and homogenous political atmosphere.

This article investigates if civic education can spur a sense of duty to vote and, in this way, help to augment the number of voters and diminish inequality in participation. I perform a systematic cross-country analysis of the link between different forms of civic education and civic duty, using the data from the 2016 International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) that include 23 countries. The results show that three key civic education mechanisms—civics courses, active learning strategies and open classroom environment—exert an influence on civic duty but that civics courses have the strongest effect. Country-level analyses confirm that civics courses are more influential on civic duty than the other types of civic education. This evidence elucidates which channels of school socialization may help to develop a sense of duty in adolescents, as well as the relative effect of each mechanism.