Chapter 9: Adolescents’ Civic Engagement: A Cross Cultural Study of Five Asian Societies

This chapter reports our initial exploration on potential predictors of Asian adolescents’ civic engagement. These factors include adolescents’ perceived democratic climate in his/her classroom, perceived importance of civic engagement, their political trust, political interest, experience of civic engagement at school, internal political efficacy and citizenship self efficacy.

Civic engagement, or the active participation, learning, deliberation, and interaction of citizens in organized activities in public policymaking, is an important component of any community’s social capital. Enhanced civic engagement is critical to the sustainability of a country’s democracy and the quality of its public judgment (Kirlin & Kirlin, 2002; Sherrod & Lauckhardt, 2009). Concerns have been expressed about the low and declining civic participation of young people (Brooks, 2009), and there has been an increase of interest in the level of civic engagement among adolescents since the turn of the century (Schulz, Ainley, Fraillon, Kerr, & Losito, 2010). These observations invite us to ask two questions, “What might be the factors that contribute to young people’s socialization as active citizens?” “Is the relationship between adolescents’ civic engagement and the contributing factors the same across diverse cultural groups?”