Evaluations of Institutional Performance Among Adolescents: Comparing the Socializing Roles of Schools and Families

Democratic accountability requires citizens' political trust to be reflective of institutional performance. It is therefore crucial to understand what fosters citizens’ responsiveness to such performance. Extant studies suggest that education shapes these evaluative attitudes. Yet, direct evidence remains limited, as many studies struggle to disentangle the effects of education from those of parental background. As a result, the debate over whether education is a genuine cause or merely a proxy for evaluative attitudes remains unresolved. In this paper, I carry out an extensive test of these two competing explanations by, first, focusing on adolescents within the same target grade (before differences in educational attainment arise), and second, testing the effect of school-level civic education characteristics often praised for the instilment of critical citizenship norms. I then compare school-level effects with those from parental background to address the proxy-versus-cause debate. Analysing data from three waves of the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study, I find evidence that structurally low and declining performance depresses political trust among adolescents. Yet, consistent with the education-as-proxy argument, the positive relationship between performance and trust is significantly stronger among adolescents with higher parental socio-economic status, while school-level civic education characteristics do not meaningfully moderate this association.