Faculty Publications
Civic Education: Do Liberals Do It Better?
Document Type
Article
Journal/Book/Conference Title
Journal of Political Ideologies
Volume
21
Issue
3
First Page
261
Last Page
279
Abstract
Recent research has found that civic education improves the democratic capacity of students and that teachers who employ an ‘open classroom’ approach seem to perform better at accomplishing this goal. We build on behavioural literature suggesting that variation in personality traits across ideology may account for why liberal middle school teachers would be more likely to foster an open classroom climate and as a result do a better job than their conservative counterparts at stimulating in their students’ political knowledge, an important component of democratic capacity. We estimate a series of quasi-experimental multilevel models using data from a survey of American students and teachers. The results indicate that liberal teachers tend to use an open classroom approach more frequently and that the students with the highest levels of political knowledge are in classes taught by liberal teachers. This effect holds up when controlling for individual-level predictors of student knowledge.
Department
Department of Political Science
Original Publication Date
9-1-2016
DOI of published version
10.1080/13569317.2016.1205965
Repository
UNI ScholarWorks, Rod Library, University of Northern Iowa
Language
en
Recommended Citation
Gainous, Jason and Martens, Allison M., "Civic Education: Do Liberals Do It Better?" (2016). Faculty Publications. 1038.
https://scholarworks.uni.edu/facpub/1038
