Colombian Adolescents’ Trust and Civic Self-Efficacy Amid Political Challenges

• In Event: 3-187 - Trust and Youth Development in Latin America: Findings from Colombia, Honduras, and Nicaragua

Integrative Statement

Trust and civic self-efficacy are interrelated dimensions of citizenship and significant for both individual civic outcomes in adolescence and broader societal trajectories (Delhey & Newton, 2004; Uslaner, 2004). In recent decades, international civic education surveys have been used to demonstrate how certain school factors and broader trends are related to trust and civic self-efficacy in adolescents. Yet, these investigations typically do not address national historical and political context. This paper draws on two iterations of the same international survey―the 2009 and 2016 International Civic and Citizenship Education Survey (ICCS)―to investigate young Colombians’ civic orientations as contextualized within national political changes. During the intervening seven years between 2009 and 2016, the Colombian government undertook a peace process that caused deep political division within the country. Also, a number of corruption scandals impacted citizens’ perceptions of the government. Based on these internal dynamics and previous research across national contexts, it was hypothesized that Colombian adolescents’ institutional trust and conventional civic self-efficacy would decrease across this period.

Differences in Colombian adolescents’ trust and civic self-efficacy over time were analyzed using multi-group multilevel confirmatory factor analysis. The self-efficacy measure included 6 items asking students to evaluate how well they believed they could do various civic activities, such as organizing a group of students or discuss newspaper articles, while the institutional trust measure included five items in which students rated their levels of trust in different political institutions such as the state government and political parties. Both of the 2009 and 2016 ICCS studies utilized a nationally representative random selection of students (6,204 in 196 schools in 2009 and 5609 in 150 schools in 2016).

Results indicated that Colombian 14-year olds in 2016 had lower levels of institutional trust (with a standardized latent mean difference of -.55, p<.05) and higher levels of civic self-efficacy, though the latter change was not statistically significant (see Table 1). These findings indicate that disillusionment with political institutions may not limit Colombian adolescents’ civic self-efficacy as they develop attitudes, orientations, and identities as citizens. To this end, political challenges to a functioning democracy may promote activism for young people, particularly when they are provided supports in their schools, families, and neighborhoods. In this talk, this explanation will be bolstered by related qualitative work in Colombia recently conducted by the first author. That is, interviews with diverse adolescents across the country demonstrate how local-level experiences of efficacy translate to active roles as peacebuilders, despite disillusionment with government institutions and political polarization. Additionally, while institutional trust is highly dependent on national politics and histories, research on international trends has revealed growing support among young people for conventional civic participation (Dalton, 2008; Hooge & Oser, 2015). Within this broader context, this study provides further evidence that declining trust in political institutions may not be deterministic of disconnected or negative civic outcomes. Future research will explore the mechanisms and contextual factors influencing these relationships.

Authors

• Gabriel Velez, University of Chicago
  Presenting Author

• Ryan Knowles, Utah State University
  Non-Presenting Author