Consensus and contested citizenship education goals in Western Europe

As schools are increasingly expected to develop their students’ political and social engagement in order to promote good citizenship, they are struggling to define what good citizenship is. In this article, we put forward a way of formulating perspectives on citizenship that specifies the normative aspects of good citizenship in a systematic manner. In doing so, we distinguish between citizenship education goals which are generally shared and citizenship education goals that are often disputed. Subsequently, an exploratory data analysis is conducted to investigate to which degree educational level in current Western European educational systems is associated with outcomes regarding these consensus and contested citizenship education goals. The findings provide support for our hypothesis that educational level is predominantly associated with general democratic citizenship outcomes, rather than with outcomes that are emphasized by more specific, but contested citizenship perspectives.