Schooling as context for the formation of supranational political support by students in Europe

Abstract

The paper applies the theory of political support as part of political cultural research in analysing data from the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS 2016) of 14 European educational systems (N = 46,500 14-year-old students). It explores the extent to which schooling (learning opportunities about Europe, student-teacher relations and civic knowledge) fosters political support of students towards the EU. As indicators for different dimensions of political support, trust in political institutions (national and supranational), attitudes towards supranationalism and attitudes towards the performance of the EU are examined. The relation between national and supranational institutional trust and their relation to civic knowledge vary systematically depending on indicators of state functioning, such as freedom of corruption in the EU member states. In-depth analyses for North Rhine Westphalia (NRW) (N = 1451 students) find—largely in line with the theoretical assumptions—that the aspects of schooling effect the different dimensions of political support; only political knowledge shows no direct effect on the assessment of EU-performance. Trust in political institutions and attitudes towards supranationalism mediates the effect of political knowledge on the positive assessment of the EU-performance.