Civic education: approaches and efficacy

Civic education (CE) was extremely popular in the 1990s as a method for promoting democracy, especially expounded by USAID, which spent between USD 30 and 50 million per year on civic education between 1990 and 2005 (Finkel, 2011). Resultantly, much seminal work on CE is from this time period, with far fewer projects and evaluations conducted recently. Some evaluations only present anecdotal evidence or lessons learned, but there is a trend towards more rigorous and quantitative evaluation. Many programmes reviewed here have used case-control methods to present robust evidence on what works. So, although there is a small evidence base from 2005 to now, the evidence is quite reliable.