Empirical Research on Political Education and the Concept of the Competence to Reach Political Judgments

In comparison to other fields of research, the state of the art in research on political education within the German-speaking countries is somewhat meager. In a first step, the authors present conceptions and core results of some of the existing research studies. Without making a claim to be exhaustive, a representative survey on the state of the art in research is given from a quantitative point of view. What is lacking so far are convincing competence-theoretically designed concepts which could promote empirical research on political education. Thus, there is hardly any consensus with regard to the definition of political competence and its gradations. Therefore, in a second step, the authors underline the need for theoretically grounded studies on the construct of the competence to reach political judgments.