Young people are the key to well-functioning future democracies. Political socialization research has shed light on different forms of civic and political participation in adolescence and documented the critical role of schools and teachers in this socialization process. At the same time, this strand of research does not inform us properly about what this exactly means for democracy.
In this article, we are assessing young people's differences in views on democracy by considering their scoring patterns via a latent class analysis (LCA) on excellent/bad democracy items in the ICCS study (an international study into civic and citizenship education of 14-year-old students) using the European and Latin-American samples. We also consider which individual and country-level characteristics go together with these profiles.
