Young Minds and Political Competencies in the Context of Welfare Support

Abstract

This cumulative dissertation lays the conceptual groundwork for fostering young people’s political competencies, focusing on the politically relevant task of deciding on welfare support. More specifically, it examines which information is relevant and which misinformation is harmful to competence in welfare support decisions, and how these insights can be practically implemented. Addressing these questions is crucial, as democracies depend on both well-designed institutions and politically competent citizens. Young people are particularly significant in this context, as the impressionable years are crucial for the foundations of the making of citizens. Yet, fostering political competencies proves challenging, given ongoing debates over what constitutes “competence” and what role knowledge and misinformation play in competence development. This dissertation tackles these issues by developing a task-based approach to political competence and applying it to welfare support decisions in three papers. Through a comprehensive literature review, paper 1 introduces the “knowledge-deservingness-attitudes nexus,” linking knowledge and misinformation to welfare attitudes via the deservingness heuristic. It proposes a new research agenda centered on young people and welfare-state-related beliefs. Papers 2 and 3 follow this agenda with empirical case studies based on an original survey of over 1,500 adolescents in secondary schools in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. Paper 2 confirms that young people rely on deservingness considerations to inform their welfare support decisions. Moreover, the employed survey experiment reveals interesting differences from previous adult-centered studies (e.g., the absence of a migrant deservingness gap), indicating potential cohort effects. Paper 3 defines a criterion for competence in welfare support decisions, identifies unemployment-related beliefs and misinformation associated with deservingness, explores sources of influential misinformation, and provides educational policy recommendations. Overall, the dissertation contributes to the literature on political competence and political education, welfare attitudes, and political socialization, offering insights relevant beyond the Swiss context. At the same time, it raises deeper theoretical questions about how to define and evaluate truth in the political sphere, particularly when dealing with contested or uncertain claims.