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3. What Is Education's Impact on Civic and Social Engagement?

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3. What Is Education's Impact on Civic and Social Engagement? 3. WHAT IS EDUCATION’S IMPACT ON CIVIC AND SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT? – 25 3. What is education’s impact on civic and social engagement? By David E. Campbell∗ Introduction While policy makers widely recognise the fact that education serves as an engine for economic growth through the accumulation of human capital, education is also strongly associated with boosting levels of social capital. Indeed, an important justification for the large expenditures on education within many democratic nations is its social, and not just economic, impact – the benefits an educated electorate brings to civil society. At a time when many civic indicators show a decline across OECD nations, it is thus imperative that we better understand the connections between education and civic and social engagement (hereafter, CSE). This report thus has the narrow objective of taking a step toward sorting through the possible mechanisms linking education and CSE, both through a review of the extant literature and original data analysis. Its broader objective is to consider whether it is worthwhile for the OECD to pursue the development of indicators pertaining to education’s impact on CSE. Anyone with even a cursory familiarity with the literature on civic and social engagement may assume that linking education and CSE is an easy task, and can be summarised tidily: education has a universally positive effect on all forms of engagement. The research literature on civic and social engagement, both old and new, is replete with references to the impact of education. Writing over thirty years ago, Converse (1972) memorably phrased his description of the tight link between education and engagement: “Whether one is dealing with cognitive matters such as level of factual information about politics or conceptual sophistication in its assessment; or such motivational matters as degree of attention paid to politics and emotional involvement in political affairs; or questions of actual behavior, such as engagement in any of a variety of political activities from party work to vote turnout itself: education is everywhere the universal solvent, and the relationship is always in the same direction. The higher the education, the greater the ‘good’ values of the variable. The educated citizen is attentive, knowledgeable, and participatory and the uneducated citizen is not.” (p. 324) ∗ David Edward Campbell, Department of Political Science, University of Notre Dame, 217 O’Shaughnessy Hall, Notre Dame, Indiana 46556, United States This paper was prepared for presentation at the Symposium on Social Outcomes of Learning, held at the Danish University of Education (Copenhagen) on 23-24 March 2006. I am grateful for the helpful suggestions made by the participants in the symposium, as well as the detailed reviews provided by John Andersen and Tom Healy. Richard Desjardins and Tom Schuller have also provided invaluable feedback. Their input has greatly improved this report but, of course, all errors remain mine. MEASURING THE EFFECTS OF EDUCATION ON HEALTH AND CIVIC ENGAGEMENT: PROCEEDINGS OF THE COPENHAGEN SYMPOSIUM – © OECD 2006 26 – 3. WHAT IS EDUCATION’S IMPACT ON CIVIC AND SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT? While Converse’s description of the “universal solvent” is oft-quoted, he was hardly the first to note the breadth of education’s empirical relationship to myriad forms of engagement. He was simply articulating the conventional wisdom among social scientists of his time. In their seminal book The Civic Culture, published a decade prior to Converse’s words, Almond and Verba (1989 [1963]) wrote very similar words: “As in most other studies of political attitudes, our data show that educational attainment appears to have the most important demographic effect on political attitudes. Among the demographic variables usually investigated – sex, place of residence, occupation, income, age, and so on – none compares with the educational variable in the extent to which it seems to determine political attitudes. The uneducated man or the man with the limited education is a different political actor from the man who has achieved a higher level of education.” (pp. 315-316) Writing in the 1970s, Marsh and Kaase (1979) again noted the striking empirical regularity linking education and engagement. And, again, the same conclusion is echoed in contemporary scholarship; the conventional wisdom of the past remains so in the present. For example, in his exhaustive analysis of trends in social capital within the United States, Bowling Alone, Putnam (2000) reiterates the tight link between education and almost any imaginable type of CES. “Education is one of the most important predictors – usually, in fact, the most important predictor – of many forms of social participation – from voting to associational membership, to chairing a local committee to hosting a dinner party to giving blood. The same basic pattern applies to both men and women and to all races and generations. Education, in short, is an extremely powerful predictor of civic engagement.” (p. 186) In light of the fact that education has for so long been recognised as so significant a predictor of CSE, it is ironic that the precise nature of that link remains largely in the proverbial black box. We know that people attend school, and then they experience a boost in their level of engagement. What precisely happens to them while in school (if anything) to lead to an increase in engagement is not well understood. In spite of – or perhaps because of – the widespread consensus on the universal, strong, and positive relationship between education and CSE, the causal mechanism(s) underlying that relationship have been subjected to relatively scant scrutiny. Indeed, one school of thought holds that, for at least some types of engagement, the content of education does not matter at all. Education only serves to enhance an individual’s socioeconomic status, which in turn increases engagement. As a reflection of how much has yet to be learned about the connection between education and engagement, it is not difficult to identify puzzling trends that would seem to fly in the face of the claim that “education is the universal solvent”. Perhaps the best known puzzle is that the individual-level relationship does not appear to hold up when we examine trends in the aggregate. Across much of the industrialised world, education levels have been rising while political engagement of all sorts has been falling. Voter turnout provides an illuminating case in point. Wattenberg (2002, p. 28) compares voter turnout rates for 16 OECD member nations from the 1960s to the present and finds that, on average, turnout has fallen by 13.2%. This ranges from Switzerland, which has seen turnout fall by 34 percentage points, to Germany (12 points) to Sweden (1.5 points). MEASURING THE EFFECTS OF EDUCATION ON HEALTH AND CIVIC ENGAGEMENT: PROCEEDINGS OF THE COPENHAGEN SYMPOSIUM – © OECD 2006 3. WHAT IS EDUCATION’S IMPACT ON CIVIC AND SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT? – 27 The apparent contradiction between a positive individual-level relationship and one that, over time and in the aggregate, is apparently negative has long been noted in the United States, which was the first of the industrialised democracies to experience a decline in voter turnout – a trend that is now widely observed across many nations (Franklin, 2004). Almost thirty years ago, Brody (1978) labelled the phenomenon of falling political engagement in the face of rising education, the “paradox of participation”. Even more puzzling is the fact that the decline in voter turnout, and other civic indicators, is concentrated among the youngest age cohort of the population – who generally also have the highest average level of education. I mention the paradox of participation not because I can offer a simple explanation for it, but simply to make the point that there is much to be learned about the intricacies of the links between education and CSE. (We will, however, see evidence that does speak to the paradox of participation.) While virtually every empirical model designed to predict CSE includes a measure of education, few analysts stop to consider just what that variable is capturing. Is it cognitive sophistication? Social status? Adherence to democratic norms? Civic skills? Or, as is most likely, is it some combination of these, and still other, factors? Furthermore, which aspects of education shape which forms of civic and social engagement? Even more elementally, can we speak of education having an effect, in a causal sense, on engagement? Could it not be that the relationship between education and at least some forms of CSE is spurious? That is, perhaps the impact attributed to education is really owing to other characteristics that are themselves correlated with education. In short, this report scratches below the surface of the well-known positive relationship between education and CES, in an effort to determine whether there is reasonable evidence to characterise that relationship as causal and, if so, the specific nature of those causal links. Executive summary Section 3.1 Education is widely recognised as having a strong correlation with multiple forms of civic and social engagement (CSE). In spite of – or perhaps because of – the widespread consensus on the universal, strong, and positive relationship between education and CSE, the causal mechanism(s) underlying that relationship have been subjected to relatively scant scrutiny. Understanding the relationship between education and civic and social engagement requires delineating multiple dimensions of engagement, namely: political engagement, civic engagement, voting, trust, tolerance, and political knowledge. Section 3.2 Two independent studies have shown that the introduction of compulsory education laws in the United States and the United Kingdom provides evidence that education has a causal relationship to multiple forms of engagement, including voter turnout, group memberships, tolerance, and the acquisition of political knowledge (newspaper reading). Similarly, using a young person’s proximity to a community college as an instrument for MEASURING THE EFFECTS OF EDUCATION ON HEALTH AND CIVIC ENGAGEMENT: PROCEEDINGS OF THE COPENHAGEN SYMPOSIUM – © OECD 2006 28 – 3.
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