13:00 - 14:30
Panel Session 1
Room: Zoom
Panel Chair: Elias Dinas, University of Oxford
Can On-line Civic Education Induce Democratic Citizenship? Evidence from Tunisia
Anja Neundorf 1, Steven Finkel 2, Ericka Rascon Ramirez 3
1 University of Glasgow, Glasgow
2 University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh
3 University of Middelsex, London

How do citizens who lived most of their lives under a dictatorship learn their new roles as democratic citizens? What is the most successful strategy to induce democratic values, increase political knowledge, reduce authoritarian nostalgia, and mobilise voters to participate in elections? In this study we take Tunisia, a new democracy, which overthrew its dictatorship in 2011, as a case study to investigate these questions. We thereby test the transformative power of social media by implementing an online field experiment through Facebook and Instagram. Young people are recruited through social media and were then randomly selected into three different online courses, which developed original civic education content. Here we test three different learning and persuasion strategies to induce democratic citizenship: 1. Emphasising gain of the democratic system; 2. Inducing loss aversion by pitting autocracy versus democracy and 3. Inducing self-efficacy with non-emotional knowledge transfer. We further use a placebo group, which was exposed to a non-political course. Data was collected using SurveyMonkey to get post-treatment responses on a series of key political attitudes and behaviours. The findings confirm that online civic education can have a transformative effect on democratic citizenship. The research was implemented in collaboration with the head and local office of the DC-based NGO “Democracy International”.


Reference:
Th-P3-04
Session:
The Political Economy of Democratic Backsliding
Presenter/s:
Anja Neundorf
Topic:
EU Politics
Presentation type:
Oral presentation
Room:
Zoom
Date:
Thursday, 18 June
Time:
13:45 - 14:00
Session times:
13:00 - 14:30

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