Further Details on the EfDI and its Competences
The EfDI captures different measures of competences. This include freedom of speech, respect for difference, respecting the rule of law, political participation, knowledge about the political system and the skills to navigate it, and a belief that all citizens are equal in status and need to be treated equally. Next, we conducted an extensive literature review on all the areas of education influencing these competences. We found as many as 350 relevant studies and provide more details on the findings of these studies in this document. This review led us to identify seven areas of education having the following distinct effects on democratic competences:*
| Educational Area | Effect on Democratic Competences |
|---|---|
| Citizenship education (CE) curriculum | The more clearly CE has been defined in the national curriculum, the more topics CE covers, and the more time is devoted to CE in the school curriculum, the higher the performance of and the greater the equality in democratic competences. |
| Participatory pedagogy | The more the teaching in schools allows students to practice democracy by allowing them to discuss social issues freely and by giving them a voice in their learning, the higher the performance of and the greater the equality in democratic competences. |
| CE in teacher training | The more comprehensively CE is addressed in teacher training, the higher the performance of and the greater the equality in democratic competences. |
| School ethos | The more the school ethos addresses democratic values and practices, the higher the performance of democratic competences. |
| Length of compulsory education | The longer the period of compulsory education, the higher the performance of and the greater the equality in democratic competences. |
| Unitary system of education | The more centralised a system of education is / the less autonomy schools have, the greater the equality in democratic competence. |
| Common Education | The more comprehensive lower secondary education is / the less tracked it is, the greater the equality in democratic competences. |
Consequently, we selected these seven areas as the building blocks of the overall EfDI and its subindexes. Guided by the effects of the areas reported in the literature, we assign higher scores to countries on a certain area if they show a policy or practice associated with higher performance levels of or greater equality in democratic competences. For instance, if a country has 13 years of compulsory education, it will receive a higher score on this area than a country with only 10 years of compulsory education.
Four areas have dual effects in that they influence both performance levels of and equality in democratic competences. Two areas influence primarily the distribution of such competences, while one area influences only the performance level of competences. While the first four areas shown in the table can be said to refer to policies and practices intentionally targeting democratic competences, the last three areas represent more general institutional characteristics that may not have been designed to foster such competences but that have side effects on them.
While the overall EfDI index comprises all seven areas, the EfDI Performance subindex includes only the first five areas, and the EfDI Equality subindex includes all areas except school ethos and CE in teacher training.** We further developed a subindex for each of the seven areas. Each of the seven areas, except length of compulsory education, was subsequently broken down into a policy and a practice component, with different indicators used to represent each of these components (see Indicators). The EfDI Policy subindex comprises the policy components of these areas, while the EfDI Practice subindex includes the practice components of these areas. Separate policy and practice subindexes were further developed for each area. The latter thus offer the most granular information.
*The attentive reader will notice that the document listing all the relevant studies also identifies other areas of education—educational attainment and CE assessment—as having effects on both performance levels of and equality in democratic competences. Educational attainment was not included in the EfDI because the indicators for this area were negatively correlated with the indicators for the other areas. Including this area in the EfDI would have undermined the coherence of the index (see the explanation under “A formative approach to index construction”) We excluded CE assessment since we found mostly null findings in our review. The number of studies is small but many find a mixed or null result.
**We could not find an appropriate indicator on CE in teacher training to include in the equality subindex.