1 Measuring Civic Competence in Europe1

Measuring Civic Competence in Europe is part of a process to establish and monitor the learning outcomes needed to facilitate the development of active citizens in Europe. This article is an exploration of how civic competence can be measured and the results of these measurements across Europe and internationally. It describes what civic competence is in terms of the attitudes, values, knowledge and skills required and how it can be calculated using existing data from international tests. The data and scales used are from the IEA 1999 international Civic Education study of 14-year-olds in school. It clearly highlights the limitations of the data coverage for civic competence and explains which aspects of civic competence are not available and the implication for measuring civic competence. Following this, the Civic Competence Composite Indicator (CCCI) is built using a framework comprised of 4 dimensions; Citizenship values, Social justice (both values and attitudes), Participatory attitudes and Cognitions about democratic institutions. Statistically the composite indicator was proved to be robust. The results of the CCCI ranking do not show clear geographical patterns. There is some tendency for Southern-European countries to be in the upper part of the ranking with Cyprus and Greece doing particularly well in the overall CCCI. For the four dimensions the results across Europe show that in countries with long standing stable democracies, where there are high levels of adult participation, young people’s attitudes towards participation and Citizenship values are low. The opposite is true for less stable and more recent democracie