Socioeconomic inequality, early tracking and civic knowledge: A cross-national analysis of adolescents in 43 education systems

This paper examines the potential association between early between-school tracking and socioeconomic inequalities in adolescents’ civic knowledge, a core component of democratic participation and social cohesion. Drawing on pooled data from the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) 2009, 2016 and 2022, we test whether early tracking affects socioeconomic disparities in civic knowledge scores of approximately 260,000 students across 43 education systems. Using three-level multilevel regression models, we find a strong and consistent association between socioeconomic status and civic knowledge. Early tracking is associated with lower average civic knowledge, whereas we find no evidence that it systematically moderates socioeconomic inequalities in civic knowledge. Robustness checks with alternative SES indicators confirm the stability of these findings. Additional analyses for a subsample of early-tracking countries reveal pronounced differences between academic and non-academic tracks, indicating within-system stratification. Overall, the results indicate that early tracking is associated with within-system stratification in civic knowledge and lower average civic knowledge at the system level, but not with a statistically detectable widening of the socioeconomic gradient. This pattern points to the domain-specific nature of tracking-related inequalities: while early tracking has often been associated with stronger socioeconomic disparities in traditional academic domains, we find no evidence that this association extends to civic knowledge.