Keywords

1 Introduction

The recent rapid influx of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers has led to unprecedented diversity in student populations in Europe (European Commission 2018; OECD 2019; Scholten 2015). To address this challenge, education policy frameworks and initiatives in European countries aim to promote common attitudes and values by means of inclusive citizenship education programs that consider differences in student populations defined by migration background (Council of the European Union 2016, 2017; European Council 2015; European Education and Training Expert Panel 2019). Of particular importance is understanding how young people relate to different forms of political and civic engagement (citizenship norms) and whether these norms are predictive of their future participatory citizenry. Extant research findings show that young people have different views on citizenship as they are developing their identity in adolescence (Banks 2011, 2017; Berry and Sam 2014; Hooghe et al. 2016; Reichert 2017; Sherrod et al. 2010). Nevertheless, more research is needed to understand potential attitudinal differences between groups of students defined by migration background living in diverse European countries.

2 Literature Review

In the European context, the body of comparative analysis based on data from the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) civic and citizenship education studies has grown considerably. For example, a recent summary of research (Knowles et al. 2018) identified over 100 published articles reporting secondary analysis of the Civic Education Study (CIVED) 1999 and the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) 2009 data. A large proportion of these publications are international comparative analyses that focus on defining and comparing citizenship competences such as civic knowledge and critical understanding, skills for active participation, and common attitudes and values in European youth. Among these, studies focused on citizenship norms have illustrated cross-country differences in students’ attitudes, as well as the importance of student background and school variables related to such outcomes. For example, some studies show differences according to immigration status, with students from an immigrant background more likely to endorse conventional citizenship behaviors compared to their native-born peers (Isac et al. 2014). Yet, this research involved average country comparisons and variable-centered analyses. Only recent work on citizenship norms has demonstrated the value of person-centered approaches for the study of citizenship norms among youth (Hooghe and Oser 2015; Hooghe et al. 2016; Oser and Hooghe 2013). This line of inquiry has provided substantial input for the theoretical and analytical approaches presented in this book (see Chaps. 1, 2, and 3), and is also informative for the work presented in this chapter.

This research (Hooghe and Oser 2015; Hooghe et al. 2016; Oser and Hooghe 2013) was largely guided by theory related to civic duty norms (Dalton 2008), and was applied to data from CIVED 1999 and ICCS 2009. It aimed to ascertain whether distinct groups of young people, expressing either “engaged” or “duty-based” citizenship norms, can be found in a range of democracies, and identified individual and country-level determinants of these different citizenship norms. A number of important findings emerged from these studies, while opening avenues for further research.

First, confirming Dalton’s distinction, the results indicate that a large proportion of young people in various countries express either “engaged” (highly endorsing the protection of human rights and community involvement, while downplaying the importance of traditional duty-based political participation) or “duty-based” (displaying the opposite normative emphases) citizenship norms. Yet, it became apparent that these two groups represent only about half of the student population in each country, and that the other half tends to adhere to other citizenship norms. Current work further confirmed this distinction with International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) 2016 data by identifying five types of citizenship norms (comprehensive, socially engaged, duty-based, monitorial, and anomic) that are roughly equivalent to the groups identified by Hooghe and colleagues (see Chap. 3). Based on previous research and current findings (see Chap. 3), the comprehensive group seems to be prevalent in a large number of countries. Further research is necessary to understand these additional types of citizenship norms and their determinants.

Second, the studies (see Hooghe and Oser 2015; Hooghe et al. 2016; Oser and Hooghe 2013) confirm theoretical expectations (Dalton 2008) regarding the overall emergence of engaged citizenship norms and the decline in duty-based citizenship over time and across countries. In this vein, Ingelhart and Welzel (2005) show that engaged citizenship norms are not prevalent only in advanced societies and established democracies (e.g., Nordic European countries) but that their emergence is more of a global phenomenon. Focusing on younger age groups and the geographical distribution of citizenship norms in the literature it is moreover apparent that the rise of engaged citizenry appears to be a phenomenon in more recent democracies (e.g., Central and Eastern Europe). In contrast, higher shares of young people in established democracies (Northern Europe) tend to be more supportive of duty-based norms, hinting at the possibility that issues such as human rights or protecting the environment (commonly associated with engaged citizenship norms) are more salient in contexts in which they are challenged. This issue certainly deserves further attention.

Third, this research (see Hooghe and Oser 2015; Hooghe et al. 2016; Oser and Hooghe 2013) shows the importance of individual background characteristics as determinants of citizenship norms. More specifically, results indicate that in most countries, engaged citizenship norms are more likely to be found among girls and students of higher socioeconomic status, while duty-based norms are more prevalent among male adolescents. Nevertheless, with few exceptions (Oser and Hooghe 2013), other relevant background characteristics, such as political sophistication (civic knowledge) or immigration status, were not the object of investigation. Regarding the latter (the main focus in this chapter), only one study (Oser and Hooghe 2013) looked at the potential impact of immigration status on different profiles of citizenship norms in Nordic European countries. This study shows that native-born students are more likely to hold both engaged and duty-based norms in comparison to students with an immigrant background. Moreover, it indicated that students from an immigrant background tend to be concentrated in the comprehensive or “all-around” profile, showing that this group of students tend to rate highly all aspects of good citizenship due to a tendency to give socially desirable answers. This finding regarding immigrant students also emerged in recent research conducted in Australia (Reichert 2017).

In this chapter, we try to build upon extant research and shed more light on potential differences in citizenship norms between immigrant and native-born students in nine European countries participating in ICCS 2016. To this end, we investigate the relationship between immigration status and citizenship norms in each country, while taking into account other important individual level factors such as gender, socioeconomic status, and civic knowledge.

3 Method

This section briefly explains the data, variables, and methods used for the analysis presented in this chapter.

The data used for the analyses were from ICCS 2016 (Schulz et al. 2018a). We used the data for nine out of the 14 European countries that participated in the European Module of ICCS 2016 (Losito et al. 2018; Schulz et al. 2016, 2018a, b). The following (groups of) countries were included: (a) Central and Eastern European (N = 2): Estonia, Slovenia; (b) Nordic European (N = 3): Denmark, Norway, Sweden; (c) Southern European (N = 2): Italy, Malta; and (d) Western European (N = 2): Belgium (Flemish), the Netherlands. In each country, the sample of students is representative of the population of grade 8 students. In order to ensure reliable results, we selected only countries where the number of immigrant students was higher than N = 200. The analysis was applied to 36,197 students clustered in nine countries. Sample sizes for all students varied from 2773 to 7848 students across countries while for the subsample of students with an immigration background, the range was between 229 and 692 students (see Appendix B, Table 3).

The students’ profiles of “good citizenship” are the outcome variable of this chapter. Here, we investigated the student background variables (with a focus on immigration status) that increase the odds of students endorsing citizenship norms in a particular way. Following the results of the latent class homogenous model across countries (Kankaraš and Vermunt 2015), we used the most likely latent group for each student as a manifest variable. The generated model identifies the probability of agreeing to each citizenship norm item in a common way across countries, while allowing the probability of membership to each pattern of response to be specific for each country. Thus, with this approach, we can carry out comparisons between countries and determine whether students of different backgrounds endorse citizenship norms in a different manner. In particular, if immigrant students are more likely to be (a) comprehensive, (b) socially-engaged, (c) duty-based, (d) monitorial, or (e) anomic citizens. These different groups of students consist of distinct patterns in which students endorse citizenship norms across countries. For the description of the outcome variable, we refer to Chap. 3. As background factors of students, we include student gender, socioeconomic status, civic knowledge, and immigrant background (see Table 1).

Table 1 Explanatory variables from ICCS 2016
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For the estimation of the relationship between student background variables that predict the odds of being classified into one of the five citizenship profiles, we used a multinomial logistic model. The outcome variable in this model is a nominal variable indicating the student’s classification in one of the five profiles of “good citizenship”: socially engaged, duty-based, monitorial, anomic, and comprehensive as the reference category. In order to ensure model convergence and stability of results, for this analysis we maintain the profiles produced in Chap. 3 (i.e., probabilities for cluster membership are not allowed to vary as a function of the explanatory variables). The explanatory variable that predicts the odds of being in a specific profile is immigrant status. We controlled for students’ gender, socioeconomic status, and civic knowledge. We used a multiple group model in order to obtain estimates for each of the nine units, including eight European countries and the Flemish region of Belgium. The general model for each country can be expressed as follows (see Eq. 1):

$$\ln \left[ {\frac{{\Pr \left( {y_{ij} = k - 1 |X_{ij} } \right)}}{{\Pr \left( {y_{ij} = k |X_{ij} } \right)}}} \right]\, = \beta_{0.k - 1} + \beta_{1.k - 1} sex_{ij} + \beta_{2.k - 1} ses_{ij} + \beta_{3.k - 1} civ_{ij} + \beta_{4.k - 1} imm_{ij}$$
(1)

All estimates produced in this chapter take into account the sampling design of ICCS 2016. Taylor Series Linearization (Stapleton 2013) was used for sampling variance estimation, including school clustering and stratification of observations. This method yields similar results to the Jackknife variance estimation with large samples (Stapleton 2008). Countries were equally weighted with survey weights scaled up to 500 cases (Gonzalez 2012). Moreover, the civic knowledge five plausible values were treated as imputation data (Rutkowski et al. 2010). Data preparation was carried out using the IEA IDB Analyzer (IEA 2017) and IBM SPSS (IBM Corp. 2015). All analyses were performed in Mplus 8.2 (Muthén and Muthén 2017).

4 Results

We carried out an analysis of the distribution of the five different profiles across the nine European countries included in this analysis for all the students in the sample and for the subsample of students with and without an immigrant background (see Appendix B, Table 4). We can observe that the majority of students in these countries (between 60 and 90% of the sample) can be described as comprehensive and socially engaged with the highest scores in Italy (over 80%). With the exception of Denmark (above 40%) and, to a lesser extent the Netherlands (above 25%), considerably fewer young people can be described as dutiful citizens in the nine European countries. Moreover, the same analysis applied to the subsample of native-born students shows highly similar results to the ones observed in the entire population. Furthermore, when looking at the subsample of immigrant students in the nine European countries, the results suggest that in the majority of countries, students with an immigrant background tend to follow the patterns observed in the general population and tend to be concentrated in the comprehensive (mostly) and socially-engaged groups. Therefore, the choice of using the comprehensive group as a reference category seems adequate in this context.

In a subsequent step we estimated a multiple group multinomial model which predicts the probability of being classified in one of the four profiles in contrast with the comprehensive profile, with a focus on the differences between native-born and immigrant students over and above the other covariates (gender, socioeconomic status, and civic knowledge) by country (see Table 2 and Appendix B, Table 5).

Table 2 Multinomial estimates for immigrant status and citizenship norms endorsement
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The following section provides an explanation of the results for each of the profiles included in the table, with a focus on the relationship between immigration status and group membership over and above the other covariates (see Table 2).

Comparing socially-engaged and comprehensive young citizens, no significant differences are found between native-born and immigrant students in Estonia, Slovenia, Norway, Italy, and the Netherlands. However, those who are native-born are more likely to be socially engaged in countries such as Denmark, Sweden, Malta, and Belgium (Flemish).

Comparing duty-based and comprehensive young citizens, it appears that native-born students are more likely to hold to dutiful citizenship norms only in Sweden, and Belgium (Flemish). The differences between these two groups are not statistically significant in the other countries.

In addition, a comparison between comprehensive and monitorial young citizens shows that the latter are more likely to be native-born in Malta. No statistically significant differences are recorded in the rest of the European countries.

Finally, looking at the comparison between anomic and comprehensive young citizens no statistically significant differences are found.

A synthetic perspective on the results, with a focus on the comparison between immigrant and native-born students, reveals the following patterns:

  1. (a)

    Holding constant the other background characteristics, immigrant students are less likely to be socially engaged (as compared to comprehensive students) in Denmark, Sweden, Malta, and Belgium (Flemish), with odds of 36%, 30%, 34%, and 52% respectivelyFootnote 1;

  2. (b)

    For all other groups, immigrant students were less likely to be duty-based, in countries such as Sweden, and Belgium (Flemish) with odds of 56% and 47% when comparing membership in the comprehensive and duty-based groups. In Malta, immigrant students were less likely to be monitorial with the odds decreasing by 38% when comparing membership in the comprehensive and monitorial groups.

Regarding the control student background variables, and the likelihood of students being classified in one of the four profiles (as compared to the comprehensive group), the findings show the overall following patterns (see Appendix B): (a) in the majority of countries, male students are more likely to be classified in the monitorial and anomic groups while female students are more likely to be socially engaged in some countries (e.g., Slovenia, the Netherlands); (b) in the majority of countries, membership in the socially-engaged, duty-based, monitorial, and (to a lesser extent) anomic groups tends to be more likely for students of a lower socioeconomic background; (c) in the majority of countries (especially in the Nordic countries) socially-engaged students tend to have higher levels of civic knowledge, while students in the monitorial and anomic groups tend to have lower levels of civic knowledge.

5 Conclusion

This chapter shows that students in the nine different European countries participating in ICCS 2016 express different configurations of citizenship norms that can be categorized into five profiles: comprehensive, socially engaged, duty-based, monitorial, and anomic. In most of these European countries, the majority of students can be described as comprehensive and socially engaged, and to a lesser extent as duty-based, monitorial, and anomic. This holds true also for students from an immigrant background that tend to be concentrated in the comprehensive and socially-engaged groups in most countries.

The main aim of this chapter is to investigate the relationship between immigration status and citizenship norms in different European countries, while taking into account other important individual level characteristics, such as gender, socioeconomic status, and civic knowledge. In this respect, two main patterns emerge from the analysis. First, immigrant students are less likely to be socially engaged and hold more comprehensive norms in four out of the nine European countries (Denmark, Sweden, Malta, and Belgium (Flemish)). Second, in two countries (Sweden and Belgium (Flemish)) students from an immigrant background are less likely to express duty-based norms while in Malta they are less likely to classify as monitorial.

These findings are aligned with insights from previous research (Oser and Hooghe 2013; Reichert 2017) that show that immigrant students tend to be supportive of all citizenship norms, and, therefore, be classified mostly in the comprehensive group. One may only speculate about the potential explanations of this pattern, especially since it seems to apply to European national contexts that are rather diverse regarding several aspects (e.g., democratic tradition, immigration patterns, integration policies, and attitudes towards immigration in the general population). In previous work, Oser and Hooghe (2013) concluded that immigrant students may be more prone to social desirability and may tend to give the “right” answer that all of the citizenship norms are important. Nevertheless, this is only an assumption that cannot be verified in the current research but should be the object of further investigation.

To conclude, this chapter sheds some light on potential differences in citizenship norms among native-born and immigrant students. Overall, we find that in most of the countries, native-born and immigrant students tend to endorse similar configurations of norms. When differences in adherence exist, the most solid finding indicates that immigrant students are more likely to hold comprehensive citizenship norms. Further research is certainly needed in order to understand the motivations behind endorsing different configurations of citizenship norms among different groups of students in European countries. Possibly, comprehensive citizenship norms are more salient to students out of a desire to be compliant or behave in a socially desirable way. Yet, given the large proportions of native-born and immigrant students supporting these norms in many countries, this explanation is most likely not the only one. Both quantitative and qualitative research could shed more light on the current findings. More specifically, future quantitative studies could look more closely at the characteristics of immigrant students endorsing each set of citizenship norms while qualitative research (e.g., cognitive interviews) could further investigate the motivations behind endorsing the questionnaire items that were used to measure the different profiles of citizenship norms and potential differences in interpretation related to student immigration background. To that end, we must acknowledge a number of limitations encountered by the current research and we caution the reader to keep them in mind when interpreting our findings. First, we must acknowledge that the immigrant students in the nine countries are a heterogeneous group and are likely to differ regarding their background, their beliefs system, and the ways they are willing and able to relate to political and social life in each country. Due to the lack of detailed information regarding student immigration background in ICCS, we were unable to pick up these potential differences in this study, but they should be acknowledged as a constraint of the current work and tackled in further research. Second, a related and very important issue is the size of the immigrant student groups captured by ICCS 2016. For the analyses reported here, the samples sizes for the subsample of immigrant students in each country were rather low (ranging from 229 students in the Netherlands to 692 students in Norway). This limitation may have affected the results, potentially underestimating the relationships to be detected and explored. This is particularly true regarding the group of anomic immigrant students that was extremely low for the current research. Although we acknowledge the logistic and financial burden associated with such an initiative, an oversampling of immigrant students in future ICCS studies could provide further and rich analytical opportunities that would shed further light on the characteristics of this group including a better understanding of their citizenship norms and their determinants.