Many scholars argue that the practice of educational tracking exerts a distinct effect on young people’s political engagement. They point out that students in academic tracks are becoming more politically engaged than those than those in vocational ones, and suggest that this may be due to differences across tracks in the curriculum, pedagogy, peer environment or student self-confidence. The current presentation investigates whether tracking is related to political engagement through any of these four mechanisms. It uses survey data collected among students in the final year of upper secondary education in France to explore this question.

To begin with the curriculum, it has been observed that while academic routes typically include a number of general subjects aimed at fostering active citizenship, such as citizenship education, social studies and history, vocational trajectories as a rule offer practical courses aimed at developing job-specific skills and teaching young people people how to be loyal workers and good followers by emphasizing discipline, conformism and good manners (Ten Dam and Volman, 2003; Eckstein et al., 2012). By thus depriving young people of their own voice, they foster disengagement and alienation, it is concluded..

Another explanation of track differences in political engagement focuses on pedagogy. Based on the notion that young people only start to identify with the political process when they are active agents in their own learning (Biesta et al 2009), scholars have noted that academic tracks generally offer more opportunities for such participatory forms of learning than vocational ones. In the former teachers encourage students to take part in debates on sensitive social and political issues and to participate in school decision-making (Ichilov 2002). In the vocational tracks, by contrast, teachers are less likely to encourage a free discussion of political issues as they fear a disruption of order within the class (Hurn 1978).

A third explanation considers the social composition of schools. It argues that the concentration of relatively disengaged and disadvantaged young people in the vocational tracks (as a result of selection on the basis of ability, as noted previously) gives rise to a peer group culture marked by a rejection of the world of politics, alternative status symbols and a contempt for the educational process (Ichilov, 2002; van de Werfhorst, 2007; Jacobsen et al 2012). In this counter culture, politics is seen as a world for ‘the others’ and politicians are portrayed as arrogant, unreliable and self-serving people indifferent to the needs of the ordinary person (Hoskins and Janmaat 2019).

Finally, tracking has been said to exert its effect on political engagement by undermining the self-confidence of students allocated to the vocational track, particularly in contexts where a large status difference exists between academic and vocational education and where the latter is associated with failure (Hoskins et al 2016). This lack of confidence or self-efficacy not only has consequences for these students’ educational aspirations (van Houtte and Stevens 2009), but also for their engagement with the world of politics (Hoskins et al 2016).

France is an interesting country to explore the effect of tracking because it has a fairly uniform system of upper secondary with relatively small curriculum differences between the academic and vocational tracks.  Consequently, if tracking mainly fuels political inequalities through the curriculum, one would not expect France to show large differences between tracks in political engagement.

We focus on voting intentions as outcome of interest rather than actual voting as the age group studied does not have the right to vote yet. However, voting intentions is a good predictor of actual voting (Quintelier and Blais 2015).

Data source We use data of the Enquête école et citoyenneté (EEC) (School and Citizenship Survey) (CNESCO 2018) to investigate the main research question. This nationally representative survey was organised by the Conseil national d’évaluation du système scolaire (Cnesco), a research agency of the French Ministry of Education, and was held among 8146 students in the last grade of upper secondary (terminale) in 2018. These students were drawn from 175 colleges. In each sampled college all the students from two randomly selected classes were surveyed. Of the 8146 students selected, 6682 participated, thus resulting in a response rate of 82%. The EEC is a rich data source that dramatically expands the possibilities to link school characteristics to civic outcomes. Unlike the IEA Civic Education Study among Upper Secondary Students (Amadeo et al 2002), it includes important information on the participating schools, such as the type of college (academic, vocational or mixed). It combines this with a wealth of data on students’ civic attitudes and family background characteristics. Analytical approach As the sample is clustered and the analysis will include variables at the individual and school level, we conducted a two-level multilevel analysis (MLA) using SPSS. MLA adjusts for the bias produced by the non-independence of observations in clustered samples and ensures that the higher level variables are estimated accurately (Snijders and Bosker 1999). We use a linear model in view of the continuous nature of voting intentions as the dependent variable. All independent variables were grand-mean centred before entering them in the analysis. The analysis proceeds in a stepwise fashion. We offer a series of models to assess which mechanism(s) drive(s) the link between track and political participation. The basic idea is to explore how the coefficient of track changes with the consecutive inclusion of variables representing the four mechanisms in the model. If the strength of the coefficient is reduced substantially after the inclusion of one of such ‘mechanism’ variables, we infer that the relation of tracking runs mainly or for an important part through this mechanism (cf. Semyonov et al 2006, Stubager 2008, who use a similar logic).

The presentation shows that tracking is strongly related to young people’s political engagement in France. Using the type of college attended as an indicator of track, we found that students in academic colleges expressed significantly stronger intentions to vote than those in mixed or vocational ones. This difference became smaller but did not disappear when we controlled for a range of conditions tapping family background and individual characteristics, suggesting that the effect of tracking is not only due to students from more endowed backgrounds or with other specific properties entering the academic track (i.e. a selection effect). Testing four mechanisms through which tracking has been postulated to influence political engagement, we found that school social composition, as one of these mechanisms, was key to explaining the relation of tracking to voting intentions: once this variable was included in the analysis, the difference between academic and vocational colleges in intended voting levels disappeared. At the same time we showed that curriculum, pedagogy and political efficacy as the other suggested conduits of the effect of tracking, could not explain the difference between the tracks. These conditions were strongly related to intention to vote, however. The reason why they nonetheless could not explain the differences between the tracks in intended voting, we proposed, is that tracks vary too little in these conditions. Our findings thus show that even in a national context with a strong tradition of curricular uniformity compared to other western countries, the academic and vocational track still have a marked gap in political engagement because of their differential social make-up. As the latter results from the (unintended) social sorting effects of track allocation on the basis of prior achievement, the implication is that equality of citizenship outcomes will likely be enhanced if this form of selection is abolished.

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