Can Civic Education Make a Difference for Democracy? Hungary and Poland Compared

Abstract

Civic education can have a significant impact on democracy. This article offers evidence for this assertion by comparing the effects of the widely different choices made in the early 1990s by two post-communist countries: Poland and Hungary. Initially, the effects of civic education were confined to teenagers; later, as generational replacement started to have an effect, one can see an impact on the politics of the two countries. The success of civic education in Poland and its failure in Hungary is illustrated by the differences in young people’s voting patterns: throughout the last decade, the vote of Polish youth has consistently been less authoritarian than the vote of older Poles, unlike in Hungary, where the pattern is reversed. Ultimately, these developments likely had an impact on democracy: one sees democratic progress in Poland and democratic regression in Hungary.