THE IMPACT OF ADULT CIVIC EDUCATION PROGRAMMES IN DEVELOPING DEMOCRACIES

Rachel M. Gisselquist, Danielle Resnick and Steven E. Finkel

Public Administration & Development, 2014, vol. 34, issue 3, 169-181

Abstract: SUMMARY Are individuals in emerging democracies more likely to embrace democratic values, to learn basic knowledge about political processes, and to engage in politics in response to donor‐sponsored civic education programmes? After more than a decade of civic education evaluations, it is a good time to take stock of what we have learned about the impacts of these efforts to strengthen democratic political culture in developing democracies. This article describes four US Agency for International Development‐sponsored evaluations that have been conducted since the late 1990s, summarizes their most important findings, and discusses the lessons learned. I show that civic education can have meaningful and relatively long‐lasting effects in terms of increasing political information, increasing feelings of empowerment, and mobilizing individuals, even in contexts beset by political and ethnic violence. However, these interventions are much less likely to affect ‘deep‐seated’ democratic values such as political tolerance, support, and trust. Moreover, the size of the effects depends critically on how the programmes are designed, the kinds of pedagogical methods employed, and the quality of the trainers. I conclude with a discussion of current developments in the field. © 2014 The Authors. Public Administration and Development published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:padxxx:v:34:y:2014:i:3:p:169-181

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Public Administration & Development from Blackwell Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().