Tietääkö kansa? Kansalaisten politiikkatietämys teoreettisessa ja empiirisessä tarkastelussa

Siirretty Doriast

The impact of life events on turnout: habitual voting does not seem to be as resistant to change as often assumed

Lauri Rapeli, Mikko Mattila, and Achillefs Papageorgiou combine two panel surveys, conducted in the UK between 1991 and 2017, to examine the impact of unemployment, retirement, changes in partnership status, moving and disability on voting. They find that turnout declines with divorce; for other life events, the impacts diverge across the voter groups they identify

Interest through necessity? : The impact of personal health on the stability of political interest in the United Kingdom

Interest in politics is a key indicator of citizens’ attitudes towards politics. Scholars disagree whether interest is a stable trait developed during adolescence, or if it changes over the life course. We hypothesise that deteriorating health can destabilise the stable sense of political interest because worsening health makes individuals more dependent on public healthcare and increase their attention to politics. Furthermore, we assume that the impact of health on interest is conditional on income as people with low incomes are dependent on public healthcare. Our results show only limited support for the first hypothesis. However, we found a negative relationship between declining health and increasing interest in the lowest income group. The results are consistent with the life-cycle theory, which presumes that important events in life have consequences even for the most endurable political attitudes. Deteriorating personal health can be a source of motivation to make persons more interested in politics.Peer reviewe

Concerned and willing to pay? Comparing policymaker and citizen attitudes towards climate change

Public opinion about climate change is well documented, but policymaker attitudes are less known. To examine the foundations for policymaking, we analyze congruence in policymaker-citizen attitudes concerning climate change. We use surveys conducted among the Finnish policymaking elite (n = 675) and a representative sample of the Finnish voting-age population (n = 1,701) in 2018–19, which included identical items of climate change concern and willingness to reduce personal living standards to curb climate change. Policymakers demonstrate much more concern for climate change and willingness to pay, suggesting a significant attitudinal disconnect between policymakers and citizens. The incongruence remains when taking personal income into account. In terms of party support, policymaker opinion aligns with opinions of voters of the green party in Finland. We speculate as to whether the observed opinion incongruence could restrict policymakers’ possibilities to make climate-friendly policies and whether climate-skeptic populist parties could use it for political gain.acceptedVersionPeer reviewe

Kansalaisten poliittinen osallistuminen ja tietämys Suomessa

Mitä parempi poliittinen tietämys, sitä aktiivisemmin suomalaiset osallistuvat politiikkaan. Tietämys ei kuitenkaan takaa oikeita valintoja, sillä politiikassa ei ole kyse vain vaihtoehtojen oikeellisuudesta vaan henkilökohtaisesta kokemuksesta

Health and Political Engagement

This title is published in Open Access with the support of the University of Helsinki.Social scientists have only recently begun to explore the link between health and political engagement. Understanding this relationship is vitally important from both a scholarly and a policy-making perspective. This book is the first to offer a comprehensive account of health and political engagement. Using both individual-level and country-level data drawn from the European Social Survey, World Values Survey and new Finnish survey data, it provides an extensive analysis of how health and political engagement are connected. It measures the impact of various health factors on a wide range of forms of political engagement and attitudes and helps shed light on the mechanisms behind the interaction between health and political engagement. This text is of key interest scholars, students and policy-makers in health, politics, and democracy, and more broadly in the social and health and medical sciences

Viranhaltijoiden suhtautuminen kuntalaisosallistumisen lisäämiseen kuntahallinnossa

Public administrators’ perceptions of public engagement in local government This article is an empirical study of the attitudes of public administrators toward public engagement. Currently there is a gap in the research on the attitudes of senior public servants who are important gate-keepers for the implementation of public engagement policies. This article contributes to filling this gap in the research by using interviews with senior public servants in a Finnish municipality. The study reveals that the administrators positively value citizens and their participation. However, there are differing views concerning the relationships between the new models of civic participation and the traditional models of planning and decision-making. The results indicate that there is an ongoing cultural change within the administration. The main factors that undermine the realization of public engagement policy can be divided into legislative, organizational, individual and cultural capacities

Can Deliberation Reduce Political Misperceptions? Findings from a Deliberative Experiment on Immigration

How can deliberative democracy contribute to our understanding of political misperceptions? Findings from the field of political sophistication suggest that misperceptions are difficult to change and corrective measures often fail. However, this field of research has paid little attention to deliberation as a mechanism to reduce political misperceptions. Using a deliberative experiment on immigration where participants engaged in either mixed or likeminded group discussions, we find some evidence of deliberation’s corrective potential, especially in mixed groups, i.e. groups where individuals with different opinions on the matter discuss these with each other. By conducting the first exploratory study on deliberative democracy’s potential for reducing misperception, we hope to advance the empirical discussion on the precise function of deliberation in the age of disinformation

Not just the facts: an index for measuring the information density of political communication

Misinformation and biased opinion-formation plague contemporary politics. Fact-checking, the process of verifying accuracy of political claims, is now an expanding research area, but the methodology is underdeveloped. While the journalistic practice of fact-checking is by now well-established as an integral part of political news coverage, academic research requires more stringent methods than what journalists thus far have used. In order to advance the scientific study of fact-checking, we propose two variants of an index measuring the information density of verbal political communication. The main index combines three dimensions: (1) factual accuracy of political claims, (2) their relevance and (3) the magnitude of observed communication. In the article, we argue for the significance of each of these components. Depending on the research problem and data, the indices can be used for comparisons of political actors across different contexts such as countries or time points, or in non-comparative situations. Using examples, we demonstrate that the indices produce intuitive results.</p