Does Formal Education have an Impact on Active Citizenship Behaviour?

In the European context Active citizenship [1] has been promoted within the education and training Lisbon Strategy as a tool to support the continuation of democracy, human rights and greater social inclusion. In this article we analyse the impact of education on Active Citizenship and contribute to the existing debates relating to education levels and participation. Our results uniformly suggest that there is a significant democratic return associated with formal education. Indeed, using a large sample of individuals from the 2006/2007 European Social Survey, we find that education is positively and significantly correlated with Active Citizenship behaviour. Tertiary education has by far the biggest impact and this impact is the strongest for the domain of Protest. The findings are robust to the introduction of a large set of control variables and to alternative measures of educational attainment.JRC.DG.G.3-Econometrics and applied statistic