Communication of civic information predicting civic knowledge and participation in youth

The declining youth participation is often attributed to a lack of civic knowledge in youth. Accordingly, its promotion represents an educational goal aimed at spurring youth patriotism and engagement. While civic knowledge is predictive of civic participation, we proposed that schools are not the main setting where young people obtain socio-political information and construe said knowledge. Thus, we assessed objective and subjective civic knowledge of Slovenian adolescents and emerging adults, who also reported on the frequency of acquiring news about social and political issues from different sources, and the incidence of both their civic and political participation. Even though we found the teachers an important source of information, other socialization agents contributed more to the latent score of participants’ exposure to information. We tested the proposed model of exposure to information predicting participation through civic knowledge, and observed significant differences among individuals of different education levels. In vocational students, the extent of exposure to civic information was linked to their subjective, but not objective knowledge, while in emerging adults the exposure was predictive of both types of knowledge. Overall, subjective knowledge was a better predictor of political participation than objective knowledge across the groups