A note on measuring political participation in comparative research

This article presents an application of Prezeworski and Teune's so-called “identity-equivalence method” to a large set of indicators of political participation. By relaxing commonly held assumptions about necessary distinctions among types of participation, it is found that the distinction between “conventional” and “unconventional” modes of participation is unnecessary, while the distinction between “government” and “nongovernment” has some merit. The findings also lend further support to the claims of Prezeworski and Teune that the identity-equivalence method is preferable to the identical indicator method

Value orientation, left-right placement and voting

In this article we try to disentangle the constraints between traditional lines of political polarization (left-right placement) and newer distinctions (materialist/postmaterialist values) among mass publics. It is shown that voting or party preference is most clearly related to the left-right placement of the respondents. However, this placement is directly and strongly dependent on the materialist/postmaterialist orientation, while background variables like education, income and age are linked to voting via this value orientation. The materialist/postmaterialist orientation appears to be the present-day interpretation of the dominant political conflict in advanced industrial society. Although alignments and orientations count for a substantive part of the variance in voting, the power of these models to predict the actual vote of people turns out to be rather poor

Political involvement and social capital in Europe

"Levels of political involvement still are surprisingly different among European citizenries. Apparently, neither the establishment of democratic institutions nor the rise in competences among mass publics has lead to a convergence of the levels of political involvement. Only at a very general level, systemic differences can be noted between the settled democracies of North-western Europe and the newer democracies of Southern Europe. The analyses presented here examine several explanations of the cross-national differences in political involvement by developing multi-level models combining the impact of various factors at the individual and the macro level using the first wave of the European Social Survey (2002-2003) as the primary data source. The results show that of the social capital factors, only the support for norms and values contributes to the explanation of political involvement after the conventional antecedents at the individual level are taken into account. Neither social capital understood as an individual resource, nor social capital understood as a conditional effect at the macro level, appears to be very relevant for the explanation of differences in political involvement. Instead, the multi-level models tested here underline the relevance of conventional individual-level factors. Cross-national differences in political involvement are mainly due to differences in the distributions of these factors in the various countries." (author's abstract

Conducive Contexts:The Impact of Collective and Individual Social Capital on Democratic Citizenship

Social capital is considered to be crucial for democratic politics. Its benevolent consequences can be attributed to two substantively different modes of social capital. Understood as an individual property the impact of social capital will be mainly restricted to those who command these resources. A much less researched approach depicts social capital as a collective good; that is, as a property of distinct societies whose impact everybody will feel. The main question of this study is: How do these individual and collective modes of social capital influence democratic citizenship in Western democracies? Multi-level modeling is used to test the impact of the two distinct modes of social capital, as well as their interactions using survey data for 28 democracies extended with indicators for collective social capital. The analyses show that living in a country rich on social capital contributes to democratic citizenship beyond the positive effects of individual social capital. Moreover, especially environments richer on collective social capital activate citizens with high levels of individual social capital are more to be politically active than less equipped environments. Apparently, those who are already privileged in terms of individual social capital will profit most from a social capital rich environment