The democratic lessons learned—How experiences of (un-)equal treatment in school influence satisfaction with democracy in later life

Abstract

Previous studies have shown that economic and political experiences influence the level of satisfaction with democracy; however, they fail to explain whether these experiences have the same effect for everyone, whether there is interindividual variance and where these differences might be rooted. In this article, we investigate these roots of interindividual variance and base our argument on the observation that early experiences in school are formative and influence the effect of economic and political experiences on satisfaction with democracy. We analyze an original representative dataset on the German population to test how school experiences, more precisely equal treatment in school, interact with economic and political experiences in later life and thereby influence satisfaction with democracy. We find that school experiences play a significant role here. Voting for the governing parties especially increases satisfaction with democracy if respondents were treated equally in school. Similarly, past experiences of unemployment in particular decrease people’s levels of satisfaction with the political system if they were not treated equally in school. The findings highlight that early experiences made in school can have a relevant influence on satisfaction with democracy in later life.

Populist Attitudes among Teenagers: How Negative Relationships with Socialization Agents Are Linked to Populist Attitudes

“…From research on street-level bureaucracy we know that state institutions serve as places where the population comes into direct contact with lived political structures and policies and that the experiences made there have an impact on political attitudes (Ariely 2013;Bruch and Soss 2018;Lipsky 1980;Shore and Tosun 2019). Individuals' treatment by authorities in these institutions affects their recognition of their own standing and value in society, subsequently influencing their long-term expectations of procedural justice by the state (Weiss and Parth 2023). Existing studies show that these interpersonal experiences in the sense of relational justice positively impact both liberal democratic orientation and trust in formal institutions (Resh and Sabbagh 2014;Pretsch and Ehrhardt-Madapathi 2018).…”