Children and Politics

For a very long time, there was consensus in democratic theory and social sciences that children and politics do not go well together. This is probably best illustrated with Robert Dahl’s statement that “no one seriously contends that children should be full members of the demos that governs the state” (Dahl, 1989, p. 126).

For several years now, this long-standing consensus has been challenged with lively discussions about and increasing calls for the institutionalization of youth’s social and political participation. With the United Nations and other societal actors demanding participatory rights for children in all matters affecting their lives, children’s involvement is increasingly seen as a valuable asset of democracy. Countries all over the world have tried to institutionalize children’s rights with organizations such as youth’s parliaments, and other (mostly local) participatory possibilities for youngsters. Whereas these initiatives are often mainly addressed to adolescents, a general shift in attention toward younger children can be observed. For instance, recent curricula for German elementary schools have introduced aspects of political and democratic learning already for first graders.

Simultaneously, childhood studies have started to demand a paradigm turn regarding the study of and with children, mainly meaning that children should no longer be perceived as “objects of concern” but rather “as persons with a voice” (Hallett & Prout, 2003). Accordingly, educational and sociological studies advocate an agency approach that deals with children as experts of their own lives.

These demands can be put in perspective furthermore by contemplating more fundamental developments in (post)modern societies. Nowadays, growing up occurs in a context completely different than in prior decades (van Deth, Abendschön, & Vollmar, 2011). First, today’s children experience new dimensions of globalization and transnationalization processes. The ongoing European integration, for example, requires thinking and living democracy not only from the perspective of the nation state but also from a European viewpoint. Second, social processes such as “individualization” or value change being rooted in a general pluralization of lifestyles, have affected important socialization institutions such as the family. Third, childhood has been getting more and more accompanied by media and commerce, which are exerting a powerful, mostly unfiltered influence on today’s children and contribute to an ongoing “liquidation of childhood” (Hengst, 1987, 2001). It is highly likely that these general societal trends also shape the formation of political identities.

Against this background, the lack of research activity in the field of children’s relationship with and perception of society and politics is astonishing. In the 1960s, there was a boom of political socialization research, considered by many the new research “growth stock” (Greenstein, 1970). Methodological shortcomings gave then way to a subsequent “bear market” (Cook, 1985) in the 1970s that continues to be the present standard. This means that the relationship between young people and politics is nowadays almost exclusively studied with older youth. Whereas there is therefore no lack of studies about the political and social orientations of teenagers and young adolescents (see, e.g., García-Albacete, 2013; Quintelier, 2013), researchers usually neglect children. Moreover, although the agency approach has recently become more popular in childhood studies, Tanja Betz and Laura Kayser (this issue) correctly point out that this only applies to a limited range of research topics such as children’s personal relationships, their everyday practices and lifestyles. Children’s views on politics and society are clearly not part of these research efforts (so far).

The ongoing paradigm change in childhood research and the emerging civic education views on children hold several implications and challenges for social science. Important political socialization and learning processes start and take place in early childhood. We have, however, hardly any up-to-date evidence about the beginning and contents of these processes. The few existing findings from different fields suggest that elementary school pupils are already politically, morally, and democratically involved (Coles, 1986; Cullingford, 1992; Sears & Levy, 2003; van Deth et al., 2011). We should therefore not only be interested in children as future citizens but rather as present citizens (van Deth et al., 2011). In a similar manner, Virginia Sapiro (2004) encouraged researchers to understand children as citizens with agency in their own right. She argues that social science loses important insights if they abandon the study of political socialization in childhood.

The six articles represented in this special issue overcome the still existing reservations to analyze children’s perspectives on politics and society. They provide new insights regarding the relationship between children and politics by dealing with several topics and new data thereby opening the discussion for questions of children’s involvement in civil society. The findings of these articles that come from sociology, educational, and political science should be relevant for all researchers of childhood sociology, for civic educationalists, and students of political learning and behavior. Among others, the articles study questions such as how children think about politics, democracy, and society. How do they express their political attitudes? What do children’s political orientations and behavior look like? How politically knowledgeable are they and what are the reasons for between-group differences? What are important democratic learning contexts and factors that shape these orientations? And, last but not least, what methods can we use to analyze children’s political involvement in an adequate manner?

The first two articles examine how children think about two fundamental phenomena in modern Western democracies. Whereas Julie Pagis and Wilfried Lignier examine French children’s reconstruction of the political left–right cleavage, Tanja Betz and Laura Kayser are interested in young children’s perception and understanding of social inequalities and the principle of meritocracy. Both articles use recently collected quantitative and qualitative data for their empirical investigations.

The following three articles deal with children’s knowledge about and involvement in the political world. Working with a three-wave-panel study of German elementary students, Markus Tausendpfund and myself want to know how and why political knowledge varies among German elementary school children. Alice Simon deals with a special variation in this regard: the gender gap in political knowledge that is apparent in her sample of French primary school children. Anke Goetzmann applies naïve theory on children’s cognitive political understanding and shows how elementary school students elaborate their political knowledge during their first 4 years in school.

Realizing childhood as an interesting period for the study of political identity formation can generate problems with common research methods and requires methodological innovations which should be both suitable for children and comply with scientific standards. In this context, Lena Haug, in the final article of the issue, presents a study of children’s political interest and shows that the use of children’s drawings as a child-typical, age-appropriate, and language-independent data collection method can complete classical qualitative and quantitative methods.