(Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Fondo Editorial, 2016-03-12) Stojnic Chávez, Lars
Specialized literature associates attitudes considered important to guarantee democratic legitimacy, such as political participation willingness with citizens’ self-recognition of their potential to influence the public sphere. As well, it emphasizes that increasing formal years of study, particularly higher education, as influential on the development of such attitude, also known as internal political effectiveness.I propose to analyze the educational mechanisms that could explain this relationship; questioning for the Peruvian context if accumulating years in higher education would be enough to understand it. Through multiple regression models, and using the data of a survey applied to Peruvian students from a private university, this article seeks to identify if having more semesters in university would be an influencing factor on higher levels of internal political efficacy or if the experience in a course aimed at challenging students about their citizenship would be more relevant. The results indicate, for the sample selected, that the latest would have a positive and significant effect on their self-recognition as subjects of power from a democratic perspective; unlike the number of accumulated academic semesters.
