Becoming a disagreeable citizen – disagreement orientation and citizenship education

Disagreement is something people often find difficult, particularly when it comes to political disagreement. For instance, people often tend to avoid discussing politics if they believe disagreement is likely. However, political participation often involves handling and engaging in disagreements with other political interests, values, and perspectives. Therefore, how young people orient themselves toward political disagreement becomes significant to citizenship and political education. Adolescence is often viewed as a prominent stage of political socialization. In addition, schools represent a heterogenous context well suited for young people to gain experience with disagreement. Therefore, experiences young people gain with disagreement and other political perspectives can be of particular importance for their current and future engagement with political discussions. This study explores debate seeking and conflict avoidance as dimensions of disagreement orientation, and how factors such as citizenship education and individual background may impact how young people engage in discussions characterized by conflicting political perspectives. Analyzing data from an original survey of 531 Norwegian 15-year-olds, this study demonstrates how discussion climate and use of political issues in education can be linked to lower levels of conflict avoidance, while debate seeking seems to be related to individual background. In addition, this paper discusses a potential typology of young people’s disagreement orientation based on debate seeking and conflict avoidance as dimensions.