This paper, based on four USAID-sponsored impact evaluations conducted since the late 1990s, finds that civic education programmes can have meaningful and relatively long-lasting effects in increasing political information and feelings of empowerment, and in mobilising individuals to engage in political participation. But they are much less likely to affect more ‘deep-seated’ democratic values such as political tolerance, support, and trust. Moreover, the size of these effects depends on how the programmes are designed, the teaching methods used and the quality of the facilitators or trainers: frequent exposure to participatory, high quality instruction is likely to be most successful. Much evidence suggests that the potential for larger-scale changes in democratic orientations through civic education is not being realised.
In all four evaluations, civic education programmes were found to be significant instruments for increasing individuals’ political information, feelings of empowerment, and levels of political participation. In the one evaluation that allowed long-term effects to be estimated, the impact of civic education exposure on these orientations was still evident nearly a year and a half after the programme had ended.
It was also found that programmes can be effective even in contexts characterised by democratic ‘backsliding’ and heightened levels of political and social conflict. And there are also intriguing possibilities that civic education effects may diffuse within treated individuals’ social networks, though the evidence here is not conclusive.
At the same time, far weaker effects have been found from these programmes on fundamental democratic values such as political tolerance, support, and trust, than on ‘empowerment’ and engagement factors.
There is strong evidence in every evaluation that factors related to the duration and pedagogical nature of the individual’s civic education experiences shaped the nature and degree of the programme’s impact. For example:
- The frequency of attendance at civic education activities was found to be the most important determinant of individual change. Individuals who attended only one or two events often showed little change in democratic orientations, while there were relatively large gains from multiple workshop exposures.
- In every context studied, civic education activities that incorporated more active, participatory teaching methods as opposed to lecture-based instruction have been significantly more effective in stimulating democratic change.
- Civic education activities with instructors that were perceived to be of higher quality also led to greater impact among those trained.
Recent civic education impact evaluations provide additional encouragement that civic education can ‘work’ even in in areas beset by ethnic violence and political conflict. They also point to promising future research on the ways that mass media campaigns may achieve comparable improvements in individual learning and collective behaviour as traditional face-to-face civic education campaigns.
