Political scientists, civic groups, policy makers and educators have long explored how to increase voter turnout (and other forms of civic engagement). One approach to facilitating political participation has been to focus on the development and delivery of civic education – classes in civics and social studies that ‘teach students the content knowledge, intellectual skills and civic values necessary for fulfilling the duties of citizenship in a participatory democracy’ (National Council for the Social Studies, 2018).Footnote 1 A number of US states see voting as such an important civic activity that they explicitly mention it in their statutes on education. For example, an Illinois statute says that ‘Instruction shall be given in all such schools and institutions in the method of voting at elections by means of the Australian Ballot system and the method of the counting of votes for candidates.’Footnote 2 Similarly, in the state of Iowa a statue requires that high school students take at least five units of social studies ‘including instruction in voting statutes and procedures, voter registration requirements, the use of paper ballots and voting machines in the election process, and the method of acquiring and casting an absentee ballot’.Footnote 3 Presumably, the goal of such legislation is to make sure that young people are well prepared to vote when they reach the voting age, with the hope that knowledge of the voting process provides a foundation for engagement.Footnote 4 It is not just state governments that view civic education as important to fostering political participation. Prominent public figures such as former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor have become fierce advocates for civic education. In a recent public letter, O'Connor proclaimed that ‘It is my great hope that our nation will commit to educating our youth about civics, and to helping young people understand their crucial role as informed, active citizens in our nation.’Footnote 5 She went on to say that ‘To achieve this, I hope that private citizens, counties, states, and the federal government will work together to create and fund a nationwide civics education initiative.’
Justice O'Connor is certainly not the first to highlight the necessity and value of civic education. Indeed, the civic education hypothesis suggests that if we teach students about government, politics and civic obligations early in life, they are likely to carry the lessons they have learned with them as they progress through life.Footnote 6 Ultimately, the hope is that students who take classes in civics and social studies will become habitual participators – voting in elections, contributing to their communities and playing an active role in the democratic process. But do civics and social studies classes ‘work’ as intended? In other words, does exposure to civic education early in life have enduring effects on civic engagement when people reach adulthood?
Political science and other disciplines have investigated the impact of civic education; these studies date back at least 50 years (Hyman Reference Hyman1959; Langton and Jennings Reference Langton and Jennings1968). After a downturn in research on civic education, likely driven by early studies that showed it was largely ineffective, recently there has been renewed interest in whether schools and civic education influence engagement in adulthood (Andolina et al. Reference Andolina2003; Campbell Reference Campbell2006; Campbell, Levinson and Hess Reference Campbell, Levinson and Hess2012; Neundorf, Niemi and Smets Reference Neundorf, Niemi and Smets2016). The question of whether civic education ‘does its job’ remains an open one. Indeed, while some scholars have noted that civic education has no effect on participation later in life (Langton and Jennings Reference Langton and Jennings1968; Manning and Edwards Reference Manning and Edwards2014a; Manning and Edwards Reference Manning and Edwards2014b), others have reported that it has positive effects on engagement (Andolina et al. Reference Andolina2003; Bachner Reference Bachner2010; Campbell Reference Campbell2008; Celio, Durlak and Dymnicki Reference Celio, Durlak and Dymnicki2011; Galston Reference Galston2001; Green et al. Reference Green2011; Neundorf, Niemi and Smets Reference Neundorf, Niemi and Smets2016; Niemi and Junn Reference Niemi and Junn2005; Syvertsen et al. Reference Syvertsen2009). Understanding whether civics and social studies classes actually contribute to civic engagement is an important question, given the fact that every year schools spend vast amounts of time and resources on civic education. If the civics training that is typically administered in schools across the county contributes little to increasing civic engagement, it may be worth looking for additional interventions or mechanisms that foster engagement. However, if civic education does yield enduring effects, it may be beneficial to expand this type of training in schools and to identify exemplars of civic education that could be implemented on a widespread basis.
In this letter, we make two contributions to the literature on civic education and voter turnout. First, we examine whether civic education influences voter turnout in adulthood using a rich, new dataset. We integrate extensive academic transcript data on social studies and civic coursework into a large-scale, longitudinal survey of a nationally representative sample of adolescents. This allows us to examine (1) whether a student's total amount of civic education influences his or her later civic engagement and (2) whether some types of courses are more effective at promoting engagement in adulthood than others. Many previous studies have employed self-reported measures of exposure to civics training (for example, Andolina et al. Reference Andolina2003; Langton and Jennings Reference Langton and Jennings1968; Neundorf, Niemi and Smets Reference Neundorf, Niemi and Smets2016; Niemi and Junn Reference Niemi and Junn2005), but our use of transcript data avoids having to rely on participants’ recall of the civic education they were exposed to in high school. Another advantage of our dataset is that we have information on voter turnout at multiple points after people leave high school. One of our turnout measures was collected at least six years after students left high school, which facilitates a longer-term analysis of the effects of civic education than many previous studies have been able to provide. Some scholars have relied on cross-sectional data to study the effects of civic education (for example, Andolina et al. Reference Andolina2003), but longitudinal data are necessary for understanding the effects of civic education at different points in the life cycle. While many studies have examined the effects of civic education, most have focused on attitudes rather than behaviors (see, for example, Andolina et al. Reference Andolina2003; Campbell Reference Campbell2008; Campbell and Niemi Reference Campbell and Niemi2016; Green et al. Reference Green2011; Niemi and Junn Reference Niemi and Junn2005; Syvertsen et al. Reference Syvertsen2009). Few studies have used voter turnout as the dependent variable (see, for example, Bachner Reference Bachner2010; Kiousis and McDevitt Reference Kiousis and McDevitt2008; Pasek et al. Reference Pasek2008) given the limited number of datasets containing measures of civic education and voter turnout.
Our second contribution is that we address an empirical complication that arises when studying the effect of civic education on turnout – that the relationship could be confounded by factors that influence both variables. On a theoretical level, the resource model of participation leads to the expectation that exposure to civic education relatively early in life will have a positive effect on voter turnout in adulthood. According to Brady, Verba and Schlozman (Reference Brady, Verba and Schlozman1995), people are more likely to participate in political life if they learn, work and serve in institutions that allow them to acquire and develop politically relevant resources (for example, the ability to communicate, an interest in politics, etc.). Brady, Verba and Schlozman (Reference Brady, Verba and Schlozman1995) focus on three measures designed to capture the development of resources and skills – years of education, language abilities and participation in high school government – but it also seems reasonable to suggest that civics and social studies classes are an important place where people can gain and refine skills related to politics. One important concern that arises when studying the effect of civic education on turnout is that the relationship could be confounded by factors that influence both civic education and turnout, causing a spurious association. Of course, one possible way to overcome this concern would be to randomly assign civic education. This is generally quite costly and difficult, which is why very few studies have used this approach.Footnote 7
While we do not have access to experimental data on civic education and voter turnout, we exploit two unique features of our dataset to obtain some leverage on the issue of confounding. First, our dataset contains a wide array of individual and family measures, which allows us to examine the effect of civics in the context of models that control for likely confounders such as cognitive ability, parental civic engagement, parental income and parental educational attainment. Many previous studies on civics have not been able to control for these types of individual and family attributes simultaneously. Secondly, because our dataset contains a large sample of siblings, we are able to develop family fixed-effects models. In these models, we compare the turnout of siblings who have different levels of civic education but share the same family background. This allows us to replicate some aspects of a controlled experiment, with siblings from the same family functioning, essentially, as each other's control group. Importantly, by using this approach, we are able to estimate how much of the relationship between civic education and turnout is attributable to unobserved influences that are shared by siblings in the same family (for example, shared genes, child-rearing practices, political socialization, etc.).Footnote 8
Data and Measures
In order to examine the relationship between civic education in high school and civic engagement in adulthood, we make use of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health). Add Health is a school-based longitudinal study of a nationally representative sample of adolescents who were in grades 7–12 in the United States in 1994–95. Four waves of the Add Health study have been completed: Wave I (1994–1995), Wave II (1996), Wave III (2001–2002) and Wave IV (2008). Although the study was developed to explore the causes of health-related behavior of adolescents and their outcomes in young adulthood, it contains some variables of interest to political scientists, such as measures of voter turnout. The dataset also includes a range of variables that can be used as controls, such as cognitive ability, demographics and parental attributes.
Although the Add Health study is valuable on its own, the Academic Transcript Social Studies and Civic Coursework dataset was recently released as an auxiliary file. This dataset consists of academic transcript data related to social studies and civic coursework for those who participated in Wave III of the Add Health Study. By coding courses using the definition of social studies offered by the National Council on Social Studies and course content that is supported in the literature as important for future civic participation, this dataset provides an opportunity to examine the effect of civic education on outcomes in adulthood. The Adolescent Health and Academic Achievement (AHAA) study collected high school transcripts for approximately 12,000 Add Health participants who were part of the Wave III sample.Footnote 9 AHAA used the Classification of Secondary School Courses (CSSC) to code these transcripts.Footnote 10 AHAA followed the procedures used by the National Center for Education Statistics to code transcripts and trained coders using training materials from the 2000 National Assessment of Educational Progress High School Transcripts Study. The AHAA coders used extensive information on course content from schools to code transcripts. For each course, coders identified the primary content of the course listed on the transcript.Footnote 11 The following categories were used: experiential learning, service learning, civic skills development, social and political issues/problems of society, historically marginalized groups, American history, international/multicultural studies and political knowledge development.Footnote 12 If a social studies/civics course could not be grouped into one of these eight categories, it was classified as ‘other humanities/social science’. Because each course that a student took was coded, we were able to develop measures of the overall number of social studies/civics classes taken during high school and of the number of classes taken within each of the categories described above. Thus we have a general measure of the extent of participants’ exposure to civic education and a series of more nuanced measures that capture the types of courses (and how many of each type) they took in high school.
Merging the transcript data into the Add Health study provides an opportunity to examine the effect of civic education on voter turnout in adulthood. Indeed, the Add Health study asked respondents a number of questions about voting. In Wave III, participants were asked ‘Did you vote in the most recent presidential election?’ (we code yes = 1 and, no = 0). In Wave IV, participants were asked ‘How often do you usually vote in local or statewide elections?’ (always = 4, often = 3, sometimes = 2, never = 1). We use these two items as our dependent variables in the analyses that follow.Footnote 13
Before proceeding, it is important to note that self-reported measures of turnout are likely to be somewhat ‘noisy’ measures of participation. Indeed, scholars have long been concerned about the accuracy of measures of voting behavior, and there is now a body of research on over-reporting turnout. For instance, Karp and Brockington (Reference Karp and Brockington2005) found that some survey respondents may intentionally misreport that they voted because they want to be seen as complying with the social norm that voting in elections is desirable. In the context of this study, one concern is a potential link between family influences and self-reported turnout. For example, if self-reports are artificially high because of social desirability, it is possible that over-reporting is also due to family influences (that is, voting is valued more in some homes than others, which in turn leads to over-reporting and might explain why siblings socialized in the same home have comparable levels of self-reported turnout). However, if children are exposed to the same within-family norms related to voting, this would be captured by our family fixed-effects. Indeed, as we describe in more detail below, family fixed-effects models capture all shared observed and unobserved influences within families (for example, child-rearing practices, political socialization, shared genes, etc.). Overall, our goal in this article is not to resolve the debate about self-reported turnout measures. After all, we only have one type of turnout measure (self-reported), so we cannot compare the performance of different turnout measures in our models. However, we acknowledge that self-reports are imperfect measures of political participation. Although it could be useful to have validated measures of voter turnout (with additional measures, we could replicate our models across different dependent variables), Add Health has never validated its turnout measures. In addition, some studies have found that even validated turnout measures seem to suffer from severe problems.Footnote 14 Ultimately, we hope future studies will replicate this study using other datasets and different turnout measures.
An Initial Look at the Effect of Civic Education on Turnout
One obvious concern associated with examining the effect of civic education on voter turnout is that some students might choose to pursue more civic education than others. For example, parents who are civically engaged might encourage their children to seek out civics and social studies classes. Alternatively, some students might be predisposed to enjoy political and social issues because they like cognitive stimulation. As a consequence, these students may opt to enroll in more civics and social studies classes than their counterparts. While variables measuring civic education might appear to have an effect on voter turnout, they may actually be capturing unmeasured variables that are correlated with civic education and that also predict voter turnout (for example, parental socialization). As an initial way of addressing confounding, we develop models that include the measures of civic education described above as well as a wide range of control variables that capture individual and family attributes that should influence voter turnout and that might also be correlated with civic education. We control for respondent sex, age, race/ethnicity, frequency of religious attendance and cognitive ability. We also control for family background/experiences by integrating measures of parental education (mother's highest level of education), parental civic engagement (mother's participation in a civic group or club) and parental income.Footnote 15 Lastly, we include a measure of the respondent's highest level of education at the time when turnout is measured (either Wave III or Wave IV). This measure is designed to capture selection into or out of higher education after high school ends (Henderson and Chatfield Reference Henderson and Chatfield2011; Kam and Palmer Reference Kam and Palmer2008).
An initial look at the effects of civic education on voter turnout is presented in Table 1, which displays eight different models. For each dependent variable, we show the effect of civic education without control variables and then with controls, which investigates how the effects change after accounting for background characteristics.Footnote 16 Before proceeding, it is worth noting that because Table 1 entails multiple tests, it is valuable to correct the significance level to account for multiple testing. Here, we use the Benjamini-Hochberg procedure.Footnote 17 The basic idea behind this procedure is to order m p-values and then find the largest p-value that satisfies pk≤ (k/m)a. This test and all tests with smaller p-values are declared statistically significant. Since we have two different dependent variables and there are twenty tests (civics measures) for each dependent variable, we implemented the Benjamini-Hochberg procedure on the twenty civics p-values in the Wave III models (Models 1, 2, 5 and 6 in Table 1) and then on the twenty civics p-values in the Wave IV models (Models 3, 4, 7 and 8 in Table 1). For the Wave III models, among the civics courses that are denoted as statistically significant in Table 1, only one of them becomes insignificant after correcting for multiple testing (civic skills development in Model 5). For the Wave IV models, all of the civics variables that are denoted as statistically significant remain significant after correcting for multiple testing.
Table 1. Effect of civic education on voter turnout in adulthood
*p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001, two-tailed
In Models 1 and 3, the total number of social studies/civics courses a student takes has a positive and statistically significant effect (p < 0.001) on both measures. In Models 2 and 4, the effects remain statistically significant even after adding the set of individual and family controls, though the coefficients decrease slightly in both cases. Overall, we note that the substantive effects are fairly small. For instance, Model 2 indicates that an additional civics course in high school is associated with a 0.9-percentage-point increase in turnout in adulthood (it is worth noting that baseline turnout is fairly low). Thus, all else being equal, a person who took zero civics courses would have a predicted turnout rate of 39.39 per cent in adulthood and their turnout rate would be expected to increase to 40.24 per cent if they increased the number of civics classes to one. Models 5–8 report the results for the variables that count how many courses each respondent had from each category. Models 5 and 7, which show the effects of civics courses without controls, illustrate that a number of different course types have statistically significant effects on turnout.
In Models 6 and 8, which add control variables, several of the statistically significant effects dissipate, although a number of the categories still have significant effects. Model 6 has four statistically significant civics coefficients, and Model 8 has two. Put another way, of the eighteen civics courses in Models 6 and 8, 33 per cent have statistically significant effects. Courses on marginalized groups and political knowledge have an effect on the Wave III turnout measure, but these effects do not appear to persist over a longer period of time. Indeed, neither variable has a statistically significant effect on the Wave IV turnout measure, which was measured at least 6 years after high school.
The two types of courses that do seem to have enduring effects on voter turnout are experiential learning courses and those focused on multicultural/international topics. Both of these measures are statistically significant in the Wave III and Wave IV models that include controls (Models 6 and 8). Once again, though, the substantive effects are fairly small. For example, if we look at the multicultural/international measure in Model 6, the coefficient indicates that an additional course in high school is associated with an increase in turnout in adulthood of about 1 percentage point. Similarly, the coefficient for the experiential learning measure reveals that an additional course in this area in high school increases turnout in adulthood by about 3 percentage points.Footnote 18 As a final note, it is worth mentioning that across the models, there is little evidence that classes focusing on service learning, civic skills development and political issues increase turnout after we control for individual and family attributes. These seem like just the types of classes the resource model of participation (Brady, Verba and Schlozman Reference Brady, Verba and Schlozman1995; Verba, Schlozman and Brady Reference Verba, Schlozman and Brady1995) would expect to increase turnout.
Family Fixed-Effects Models
The models in Table 1 provide valuable leverage over the issue of confounding. However, it is possible to push our data a bit further to see whether the observed civic education effects discussed above hold up to additional scrutiny. Do the civics courses that have significant effects on turnout in adulthood reported in Table 1 persist in the context of family fixed-effects models? If they do, it may be a signal that these courses are particularly effective in elevating turnout in adulthood.
Because the Add Health study has a fairly large sample and contains a subsample of siblings within the same families, we can utilize family fixed-effects models.Footnote 19 We compare the estimated effect of civic education in a conventional cross-sectional model in which siblings are treated as individuals (without accounting for family) to the estimated effect in a fixed-effects model that accounts for all of the influences that are shared by siblings within the same family. Comparing the turnout of siblings with different levels of civic education but the same family background is as close as we can get to a controlled experiment. In this case, siblings from the same family serve as each other's control group. This approach allows us to control for all of the observed and unobserved family characteristics shared by the siblings, because only within-family variation is used to estimate the fixed-effects models.Footnote 20 Yet this approach cannot estimate the effect of unobservable confounders that are not shared by siblings. The family fixed-effects approach has recently been used to study the relationship between voting and health (Burden et al. Reference Burden2016), education (Dinesen et al. Reference Dinesen2016; Gidengil et al. Reference Gidengil2019) and non-cognitive factors (Hillygus, Holbein and Snell Reference Hillygus, Holbein and Snell2016; Holbein et al. Reference Holbein2020). However, we are not aware of studies that employ this approach to examine the relationship between civic education and turnout.
While powerful, the family fixed-effects model rests on two important assumptions that, if violated, may lead to biased results. First, the model assumes that determinants of within-sibling differences in civic education are not correlated with voting. If there are unaccounted for sibling differences resulting from unshared experiences (for example, birth order, personality traits, cognitive ability) that positively influence both civic education and voting, the estimated effect of civic education on turnout will be inflated. Concerns about confounding, of course, are only relevant if we find a significant relationship between civic education and turnout based on the fixed-effects model.Footnote 21
The second assumption is the stable unit treatment value assumption (SUTVA). In our case, SUTVA requires that the civic coursework of one sibling only influences their voting behavior and not the voting behavior of another sibling. If one sibling's civics coursework also increases another sibling's likelihood of voting, this would bias the estimated relationship between civic education and turnout in the fixed-effects model downward. Our data contain twin and non-twin siblings; we would expect a greater chance of a SUTVA violation if we were focused only on twins since identical (monozygotic) twins typically report being close to one another and thus potentially influence one another (Dinesen et al. Reference Dinesen2016). We should also point out that concerns about SUTVA violations are less likely to be an issue for our Wave IV measure of turnout since it was elicited when respondents were between 25 and 34 years old – thus the spillover of civic education from one sibling to the next would have to persist for a very long time. It could also be the case that civic education for one sibling depresses the turnout of another sibling, but this seems highly unlikely. Below, we provide a preliminary test of this idea and find little evidence that this occurs.
Before analyzing the results, we note that for the fixed-effects analyses we specify linear models. We use this approach instead of logistic regression because in cases where families do not vary on the dependent variable (all siblings voted or none of them voted) they would be dropped when estimating the logistic fixed-effects models.Footnote 22 Using linear models lets us include these siblings in our analysis, which is an important advantage of this approach. We present the results of the fixed-effects models graphically in Figure 1.Footnote 23 There are two panels – one showing the results for the Wave III turnout measure and one showing the results for the Wave IV measure. It is worth recalling that in Table 1 a total of eight civics measures were significantly related to turnout after controlling for other factors. Thus Figure 1 focuses on the effects of these measures. In each panel, we present ordinary least squares (OLS) estimates (controlling for age and sex) in which respondents are treated as individuals without regard to their membership in a family and familial factors are not taken into account, and the family fixed-effects estimates, which gauge the within-family impact of civic education on turnout. These are the estimates of primary interest, but it is useful to present the OLS estimates since they provide a sense of how the relationship between civic education and turnout changes after accounting for confounding factors rooted in the family. In short, the OLS estimates presented in Figure 1 are similar to the effects of civics courses shown in Table 1 (for the models that do not include control variables). It is important to point out one limitation of Figure 1: the samples used to estimate the effects shown in the figure are considerably smaller than the samples used in Table 1 since the figure only uses the subset of siblings in the sample. In Figure 1, the Wave III sample is comprised of 1,923 siblings and the Wave IV sample is comprised of 1,579 siblings. Thus, we acknowledge that the smaller sample sizes in the sibling fixed-effects analyses lead to reduced precision in our estimates compared to those in Table 1.Footnote 24 However, we still believe it is worth examining the results of these models, even if they are taken as suggestive until similar studies can be conducted using larger sibling samples.
Figure 1. Comparing effects of civic education in OLS and family fixed-effects models
There are a few things worth noting when looking at Figure 1. First, the civic education effects are fairly small in magnitude given the point estimates and the ranges of the confidence intervals. Secondly, most of the effects that remained significant in Table 1 after accounting for controls seem to dissipate once we account for family fixed effects (Wave III – total civics classes, experiential learning, marginalized groups; Wave IV – total civics classes, experiential learning). Although none of the civics variables is statistically significant at conventional levels in the fixed-effects models in Figure 1,Footnote 25 the coefficient for courses on multicultural/international issues is close to statistical significance in both the Wave III and Wave IV fixed-effects models (p = 0.067 and p = 0.124 [two-tailed], respectively). Thus, of the nine different types of civics courses we analyze, these types of courses appear to be the most likely to be related to voter turnout in adulthood.
Overall, the results in Figure 1, when considered alongside those presented in Table 1, suggest that most civics courses do not have statistically significant effects on turnout in adulthood and that any effects that exist are unlikely to yield large increases in turnout in adulthood (as many have hoped).Footnote 26 Above, we noted that sibling fixed-effects models come with limitations, such as decreased precision. Although our results are suggestive of null relationships between most civics courses and turnout in adulthood, we note that even if one considers the OLS estimates in Figure 1, which only control for age and sex (and are therefore likely to be liberal estimates of the effects), the civic education effects are very small, just as they were in our initial analyses. For example, the coefficient for multicultural/international courses in the Wave III model is 0.022, which means that an additional civics course in this area in high school is associated with an increase in turnout in adulthood of just 2.2 percentage points. Such an effect is fairly small given that some interventions that are far less expensive and time consuming than civics courses (such as postcards) can increase turnout by 2 to 8 percentage points (see, for example, Gerber, Green and Larimer Reference Gerber, Green and Larimer2008) and can have effects that persist for years (Davenport et al. Reference Davenport2010). It is also interesting to note that the civic education effects in Figure 1 are comparable to some of the socialization effects in Table 1. For instance, a one-unit increase in parental education corresponds to a 1.4-percentage-point increase in turnout in adulthood. Similarly, children whose parents are civically involved exhibit a 3.3-percentage-point increase in turnout when they reach adulthood compared to their counterparts. Thus civics courses, even when they work, do not appear to make up for differences in family background.
Overall, our takeaway is that while civics courses likely have null effects on turnout in adulthood, the best-case scenario is that civic education exerts very small effects overall. Ultimately, we hope future researchers will replicate our analyses using larger sibling samples. We are not aware of any other datasets that contain sibling samples, transcript-based civics measures and turnout measures, but we encourage the collection of such data. Although our results provide initial evidence that civics courses have little effect on voter turnout in adulthood, additional analyses will be helpful as political scientists, civic groups, policy makers and educators continue to think about the effectiveness of civic education in fostering voter turnout.
Discussion
Scholars, educators and civic groups have long been interested in ways to increase voter turnout. Civic education is often proposed as a way to provide people with basic information about the political system and, hopefully, motivate them to become politically active. Here, we focused on the link between civic education in high school and later political behavior – whether people vote in elections when they reach adulthood. It is important to note that we did not focus on the relationship between civic education and political orientations, such as knowledge about politics or the sense of political efficacy. Thus, although civics courses do not appear to substantially boost turnout, they could generate increases in political knowledge or other orientations towards politics. Some scholars have found evidence that civics classes lead to improved political knowledge (McIntosh, Hart and Youniss Reference McIntosh, Hart and Youniss2007; Niemi and Junn Reference Niemi and Junn2005), but it would be especially valuable to build on this work by examining the relationship between civics and variables like political knowledge in the context of family fixed-effects models, which provide leverage over some of the familial variables that might confound this relationship. We encourage future work in this area.
Overall, the results of this analysis provide a pessimistic view of the power of civic education to increase voter turnout.Footnote 27 It appears that the effect of civic education on turnout is confounded by familial factors that influence both civic education and engagement. Although the family fixed-effects approach does not allow us to precisely examine which family factors confound the relationship, there are a number of factors that likely shape both the choice to take civics courses and later political engagement. Galais (Reference Galais2018) describes one possible family factor that could influence both variables. She notes that ‘By fulfilling their obligations with the child's schooling, parents are “preaching by practice.” Showing their involvement with the school community, the child might learn to do so in the future with a broader community … children whose family is involved in their education should be more dutiful in the future than those raised by more disengaged families’ (604). It is conceivable that parental behavior could lead children to feel a sense of obligation toward their community and possibly foster a desire to take civics courses in school. In addition, an early sense of obligation passed on from one's parents might also translate into a sense of obligation to participate in political life (that is, voting in elections) when one reaches adulthood. Another possibility comes from social learning theory, which suggests that children have a tendency to imitate their parents (Kudrnáč and Lyons Reference Kudrnáč and Lyons2017). Thus children who observe their parents being active in the community may become interested in taking civics courses in school – where they can learn how to be active in civic life. Observing one's parents engage in community life could also foster a commitment to engage in civic activities like voting in elections. Future researchers should seek to identify the specific family attributes and experiences that drive children to participate in civics courses and vote in elections later in life.
The results of this article have some practical implications. The evidence presented here suggests that civics coursework in high school likely has little effect on voter turnout in adulthood. As noted above, although civic education may have positive effects on other dimensions of citizenship (for example, knowledge or efficacy) and may therefore be valuable, scholars, educators and civic groups should not count on civic education in high school to elevate turnout levels. One idea that stems from our results is that schools should look for other interventions or mechanisms that can foster political participation. For instance, some recent research has shown that interventions designed to improve non-political skills (for example, psychosocial skills, such as self-control) can have downstream effects on political engagement (see, for example, Holbein Reference Holbein2017). These types of experiences appear to have fairly large effects on voter turnout in adulthood and may represent a more effective and efficient way of shaping voter turnout than the traditional civics curriculum typically delivered in schools.
Supplementary material
Online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123420000435.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Sven Oskarsson and Robert Klemmensen for their feedback on earlier drafts of this article. In addition, we thank Editor Rob Johns and three anonymous peer reviewers for their thoughtful suggestions and comments on the article.
Data availability statement
Data replication sets are available in Harvard Dataverse at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/MOXPEM
