Evaluations of institutional performance among adolescents: Comparing the socializing roles of schools and families
2026-07-29
Democratic accountability requires citizens’ political trust to reflect institutional performance, making it crucial to understand what fosters such responsiveness. While existing studies suggest that education shapes evaluative attitudes, direct evidence remains limited because many analyses struggle to separate educational effects from those of parental background. This paper offers a comprehensive test of these explanations by examining adolescents within the same target grade and by assessing school-level civic education characteristics often credited with cultivating critical citizenship norms. It then compares school-level patterns with parental background to evaluate the proxy-versus-cause debate. Using data from three waves of the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study, the analysis shows that structurally low and declining institutional performance depresses political trust among adolescents. However, consistent with the education-as-proxy argument, the positive association between performance and trust is significantly stronger among adolescents with higher parental socio-economic status, while school-level civic education shows no meaningful moderating effect.