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Policy Brief: Education for Responsible Democratic Citizenship. A European Vision. Submitted Version
(2025)
Democracy is the cornerstone of European identity, which is complementary to national identities. In view of the challenges democracy is currently facing, at both European and national level, such as growing polarisation, increasing threats to human security and expanding digitalisation, it is important to defend and consolidate it, as a sine-qua-non element of “the European way of life”. Education for responsible democratic citizenship (RDC) or education for democracy (EfD) for short is a way of doing so. EfD strategies and tools to strengthen the democratic agency/capacity for action of citizens, the youth in particular, through transformative learning, has been the focus of the DEMOCRAT project (March 2023 to February 2026).
This Policy Brief was initially drafted after the seven first months of the DEMOCRAT project but is now being finalised with the experience of two-and-a-half years of project implementation in mind. Key findings and proposed policy actions presented here include:
· To safeguard democracy within the European Union, transformative education for democracy must be reinforced, also taking into account fast-moving digitalisation and fast-breached planetary boundaries.
· The shift to transformative education for democracy should be based on a coherent competence framework defined in complementarity with the frameworks of citizenship competences proposed by the EU (Key Competences for Lifelong Learning) and the Council of Europe (Competences for Democratic Culture). The four key RDC competences identified by DEMOCRAT are: Solidary Participation, Deliberation, Judgement, and Democratic Resilience.
· The above competence framework should be translated by EU member states and schools in different parts of Europe into a sample curriculum for responsible democratic citizenship adjusted to their education systems and societies.
· Schools have to be laboratories of democratic practice on a daily basis and across subjects, not just for a few hours of civic education or education for democracy per week, and need to connect with a conducive local, regional, national, European, global and digital environment.
· Students need to be aware of both their rights and responsibilities, and be guided to act on both, within their peer groups and in relation to their teachers, parents, local authorities and other relevant stakeholders.
A crucial aspect of any approach to education for democracy is the competence of the teacher to create an environment in which the students can learn democracy in action and not just in words
The DEMOCRAT Project’s work packages are built on each other. This evaluation report is the penultimate stage of the complex Education for democracy (EfD) process designed, tested, evaluated and shared for exploitation by the consortium. DEMOCRAT has outlined a European curriculum for EFD, based on a shared understanding of what democracy means, as well as a competence framework for responsible democratic citizenship (RDC). The curriculum has been piloted in a series of interventions in primary and secondary schools in the six EU member states in which DEMOCRAT has operated: Estonia, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Poland and Spain. In some countries, the testing stage also included interventions in teacher training at higher education institutes.
The national activities were designed on the basis of the DEMOCRAT competence framework (included in D2.1), taking into account preliminary national reports on education inequalities and the state of the art in EfD (D3.1) in the six participating countries. The national and local work that is evaluated in the present deliverable is also based on DEMOCRAT deliverable D5.1. (Design of local pilot projects (LPPs)), as well as on subsequently developed tools (see Annexed Guides) and includes the self-assessment of the pilot participants. A final elaboration of the national pilot interventions will be done when they are compiled into the DEMOCRAT Toolbox (D6.1., under preparation).
The results of the assessment of the national intervention were presented in the deliverable D5.2 and the results of the comparison of the intervention in the deliverable D5.3). It is worth noting that the various pilots/interventions, because of their limited scale and duration, are not considered as providing strictly scientific evidence about the efficiency and effectiveness of the learning approaches used in terms of RDC competence development. For the DEMOCRAT Project, the primary objective was to test and further develop the competence framework and the assessment tools, as well as to obtain insights of possible success and hindering factors for novel approaches in Education for Democracy. Pilots show that the school heads and teachers have a crucial role in education for democracy and that they can contribute significantly, as agents of research and development, as well as implementation. Here we present the results of the assessment of the German pilot interventions: Mediator Training.
Meinungsumfragen bieten Orientierungshilfen für Journalisten und Wähler und sind somit gerade vor Wahlen eine relevante Informationsquelle. Umso wichtiger ist es, dass Befragungsinstitute verlässliche Prognosen liefern. Vom Wahlergebnis stark abweichende oder dem Wahlergebnis widersprechende Prognosen können nicht nur das Vertrauen in Wahlumfragen, sondern auch in Umfrageforschung generell schwächen. Zur Erklärung der Diskrepanzen zwischen den Prognosen der Institute und dem Wahlergebnis sind verschiedene inhaltliche und methodische Kriterien zu berücksichtigen. Aus methodischer Perspektive spielt neben dem Befragungszeitpunkt, der Stichprobenzusammensetzung und dem Umgang mit Rohdaten auch der Erhebungsmodus eine nicht zu unterschätzende Rolle. In der Forschung wird auf signifikante Unterschiede zwischen persönlich-mündlichen und Onlinebefragungen hingewiesen, was die Betrachtung der Befragungsmodi für Wahlforschung umso relevanter macht. In dieser Studie wird daher untersucht, wie sich die Ergebnisse von Onlinebefragungen und face-to-face Befragungen in der heißen Phase der Bundestagswahl 2021 unterscheiden. Hierfür werden die Ergebnisse von je zwei persönlich-mündlichen und zwei Onlinebefragungen miteinander verglichen. Das feldexperimentelle Design der Studie verdeutlicht, dass Wahlumfragen im Onlinemodus mit Quotenstichproben die Wahlbeteiligung überschätzen und Stimmanteile der CDU und SPD unter- sowie der Grünen, Linken und AfD überschätzen. Da der Befragungsmodus sowohl die Wahlberichterstattung als auch das Wahlverhalten beeinflussen kann, ist dessen Wirkung in weiteren Studien systematisch zu untersuchen.