Abstract

The current political times offer a complex global context to understand youth political attitudes and dispositions. This chapter describes both the international environment and the conceptual framework that justifies the need to better understand citizenship among youth in different countries of Asia, Europe, and Latin America. Traditional perspectives used to define citizenship fall short to the challenges of what is needed from a citizen in the 21st century, which has already brought the display of protests towards institutions, dissatisfaction with liberal democracies, the rise of authoritarianism and populism, concern about the climate crisis, and an increase of immigration. So, how can we understand and describe citizenship today? What is expected of the ideal citizen? The present book has three objectives. First, it aims to study good citizenship from both a theoretical and an empirical perspective. It finds that there are five configurations, presenting more complex interpretations that show how youth endorse different citizenship norms into distinct profiles that are internationally comparable. Second, across the different chapters, the book describes and discusses how these different configurations are distributed between countries and schools, and what is similar and what is distinctive between these profiles when compared against a range of citizenship outcomes. Third, the book focuses on specific challenges facing countries in Asia, Europe, and Latin America, and provides locally informed research questions and interpretations of findings. We use IEA’s International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) 2016 data to explore these objectives. We briefly describe the content of each chapter in the following sections and the methodological approach used in each chapter.