In this article we revisit and re‐analyse data from the 1999 IEA CIVED transnational study to examine the factors associated with the ways in which young people learn positive attitudes towards participation in, and knowledge and skills about democracy. Less formal learning, wherever it takes place, has recently been conceptualised as a process of social participation, and we explore its effects using Lave and Wenger's and Wenger's understanding of learning through communities of practice. This is then contrasted with the effect of the volume of civic education. The analysis shows that learning through social participation, both inside and outside school, and in particular through meaning‐making activities shows a strong positive relationship with citizenship knowledge, skills and dispositions across a wide range of countries. Moreover, it demonstrates the usefulness of situated learning theory in the field of civic learning, and its applicability in large‐scale, quantitative studies.

In the European context Active Citizenship has been promoted within the education and training Lisbon Strategy as a tool to support the continuation of democracy, human rights and greater social inclusion. In this article the authors analyse the impact of education on Active Citizenship and contribute to the existing debates relating to education levels and participation. The results of their analysis uniformly suggest that there is a significant democratic return associated with formal education. Indeed, using a large sample of individuals from the 2006/2007 European Social Survey, it was found that education is positively and significantly correlated with Active Citizenship behaviour. Tertiary education has by far the biggest impact and this impact is the strongest for the domain of Protest. The findings are robust to the introduction of a large set of control variables and to alternative measures of educational attainment.

This article tackles the issue of social inequalities in voting and identifies how and when differences in learning political engagement are influenced by social background in the school environment between the ages of 11-16 in England. Using Latent Growth Curve Modelling and Regression Analysis on the Citizenship Education Longitudinal (CELS) data this research identifies two elements that influence the political socialisation process: access to political learning and effectiveness in the form of learning in reducing inequalities in political engagement. The results show that there is unequal access by social background to learning political engagement through political activities in school and through an open classroom climate for discussion. However, there is equal access by social background to Citizenship Education in schools and this method of learning political engagement is effective at the age of 15-16 in reducing inequalities in political engagement.

Both direct and indirect influences have been assumed to impact the transmission of political orientations within families. A lower socioeconomic status is related to lower intended political participation of adolescents. Within this context, schools play a crucial role in political socialisation, as citizenship education is assumed to either equalise or maintain these social disparities. We analyse a sub-dataset of the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study 2016 which includes 14-year-old students in four European countries: Belgium (Flanders), Denmark, Germany (North Rhine-Westphalia) and the Netherlands. Multi-level regression analyses reveal that formal citizenship education compensates the relationship between students’ socioeconomic status and intended electoral participation in Denmark, Germany (NRW) and the Netherlands, but not in Belgium (FL). Further, the composition of school classes is related to the perception of an open classroom climate in each of the four countries and to participation in civic activities at school in three countries.