Are schools making things worse?:The social reproduction of inequalities in political engagement.

Description

ESRC LLAKES centre conference.
Abstract:
The level of youth participation in the 2017 UK election is contested and widely debated (Sloam 2018; Prosser et al 2018). However, what is uncontested is the fact that by some considerable margin the social group who voted the least were disadvantaged young people. The situation of socioeconomic inequalities in political engagement unfortunately is not new, not confined just to voting and applies to most of the democratic western world (Dalton 2018). However, there is limited understanding about the mechanisms in which this occurs and the role of education in this process.
In this context, this paper will develop and test the theory of social reproduction of social inequalities in political engagement. The theory in brief is that young people learn political engagement through a combination of participatory activities and knowledge transmission processes and that education can contribute to social reproduction by not providing the same access to these learning opportunities and by providing learning opportunities from which middle-class children benefit more than working class ones.
In this paper, we test these theories using longitudinal data from the age of 11-12 to 23. This is particularly interesting as at this earlier age the separation and differentiation of learning opportunities is much less explicit in the UK education system. We also explore access for young people to voluntary political learning opportunities in schools and between schools with different social intakes.

Period	15 Nov 2018 → 16 Nov 2018
Held at	Univeristy College London, United Kingdom
Degree of Recognition	International