Democracy Health of European Schools and Non-Formal Educational Institutions: A Comparative Perspective

• In Event: Democracy Health of Educational Institutions and Perspectives of Youth on Democracy and Education in Digital Societies – Insights from 10 EU Countries

Proposal

As part of the Critical ChangeLab project, we developed the Democracy Health Questionnaire (DHQ) and the Democracy Health Index (DHI) to assess and quantify the democracy health of educational institutions across Europe. The concept of “democracy health” encompasses the level of democratic values and practices within an institution, serving as broad indicators of its democratic culture. The DHQ evaluates four democratic values: 1) Participation, 2) Accountability and transparency, 3) Equality, diversity, and inclusion, and 4) Eco-social responsibility. These values are linked to 26 key practices, spanning the life cycle of educational programs from development, access, and delivery to outcomes and impact.

The DHQ has been designed in two parallel versions—one for schools and another for institutions offering non-formal educational programs. In both versions, participants assess the importance, current level, and five-year expectations for each democratic value and practice within their institution, using a scale from 0% (not at all) to 100% (very much). From the responses, three indicators of the DHI will be calculated: DHI Total, DHI Domain (reflecting the current level of institutional democracy overall and in specific domain, weighted by the perceived importance of each item), and the DHI Profile, which highlights the gap between the current state and five-year expectations of democracy health. The DHQ and DHI were designed as self-assessment tools to help educational institutions evaluate their democratic culture, identify areas for improvement, and guide strategic actions to enhance democratic practices.

The scale validation process included data collection from ten EU countries, with over 1,300 participants, including school principals and heads of non-formal educational institutions, completing the DHQ via the online research platform. In this presentation, we focus on data from schools in Austria, Croatia, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Slovenia, and Spain, as well as from institutions offering non-formal education in Croatia, Finland, Greece, and Ireland. We present key findings from the comparative analysis of DHI indicators and discuss these results in the context of national educational propositions, highlighting both convergences and divergences.

Finally, we outline the next steps in the refinement of the DHQ and DHI, with the goal of enhancing their usability and enabling comprehensive cross-national comparisons, including future global applications.

Authors

• Jelena Matic Bojic, Institute for Social Research in Zagreb (ISRZ)

• Zrinka Ristic Dedic, Institute for Social Research in zagreb