Gender equality in the structure of civil-political orientations of teenagers from 19 countries

Abstract

. The article discusses one of the fundamental problems of modern political systems development — the civil and political rights of women in countries that differ in their cultural, economic and other parameters. Equality is treated as an imperative in the construc-tion of civil-political subjectivity at the macro-social level, as a part of the structure of modern citizenship. This provision is differently reproduced in national contexts and is represented at the level of value orientations of citizens. It is assumed that this depends on many factors, including the type of political regime, the degree of development of political culture, and political participation. The subject of empirical analysis is the change in the level of support for the civil and political rights of women among 14-year-old students in different countries. For this, the data from an international monitoring study aimed at identifying and describing the civic and political orientations of adolescents are compared (IEA Civic Education Study 1999; International Civic and Citizenship Education Study 2009, 2016). Comparative analyses of the data collected in 19 countries. According to the results of the study, fundamental chan-ges were recorded in the level of support for the civil and political rights of women in different countries, which allowed us to distinguish three homogeneous groups. The first included Denmark, Norway, Taiwan and Sweden. According to the results of the last measurement, the vast majority of students surveyed in these countries, both male and female, keep to egalitarian norms of citizenship. The second group includes countries where egalitarian gender norms in politics and the civil sphere have an average level of support. The third group is represented by teenagers from four post-socialist countries (Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia) and the Dominican Republic, among which there are strong traditionalist attitudes, and there is also a significant dissimilarity between representatives of different sexes in this inquiry. The data obtained are compared with globally recognized ratings (Democracy Index 2016, Global Gender Gap Index 2016, Polity IV). Based on the results of this comparison, it is concluded that there is a high correlation between the degree of support for women’s civil and political rights and the institutional political order that has developed in the country (r = 0,79), the level of development of political culture (r = 0,70), and average correlation (r = 0,65) with political participation.