Trust in Government and Civic Engagement among Adolescents in Australia, England, Greece, Norway and the United States.

The goal of the IEA Civic Education Study has been to examine in a comparative framework the political socialization of adolescents as they prepare to undertake their roles as citizens in democracies. Approximately 90,000 students from the modal grade for 14-year-olds from nationally representative samples in twenty-eight countries were tested during 1999. This paper focuses on the predictors of four different types of political engagement: electoral, partisan, volunteer, and protest. The potentially influential factors to be examined are knowledge of democracy and skills in interpreting information, sense of trust in government related institutions, several aspects of the schools (perceptions of curriculum, sense of efficacy developed in the school culture, perceived encouragement of discussion in the classroom, and current participation in organizations). The countries included in this presentation include Australia, England, Greece, Norway, and the United States. The theoretical base for the paper is Wenger’s work on communities of practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]