National Systems of Civic Culture: Social Media, Civic Education, Trust and Democracy in ICCS 2016

Abstract

This paper proposes modeling national trust and civic culture systems among 14- year-old students in schools comparatively using ICCS 2016 data on 24 countries and territories. Data include more than 94,000 students in their eight grade of schooling in about 3800 schools. Based on previous studies, it is hypothesized to find (1) a positive effect of institutional trust on interpersonal trust, (2) a positive effect of trust in political institutions on democratic values and behavior, and (3) that social media use may cause institutional distrust and negatively affect democratic values and behavior. Proposed trust and civic culture systems (1)-(2) are studied using SEM. LCA is used to investigate (3). Results surprisingly indicate that (1) distrust in political institutions may instead provoke civic participation and democratic values, (2) distrust in political institutions can instead breed interpersonal trust, and (3) there is no significant student institutional distrust due to trust in social media.