Sociologický ústav AV ČR, v.v.i.

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2008:1 The Political Awareness of Citizens: Theories, Measurements and the Role of Political Awareness in the Study of Political Attitudes

Lukáš Linek, Pat Lyons

This study explores political awareness of Czech citizens from the point of view of both its distribution within the society, its dimensionality and sources, and its effect on political attitudes and their constraints. This topic is important for political representation. According to one of the most influential theories of political representation, the Responsible Party Model, citizens are only effectively represented in parliament and government if they are (1.) able to articulate their policy preferences, (2.) discriminate between political parties’ policy platforms and (3.) the capacity to select the party most likely to implement citizens’ desired preferences. Empirical research from the 1950s demonstrates that citizens are often uninformed, and this suggests that political representation is likely to be biased in favour of citizens with high levels of education, income and knowledge. Whether this is indeed the case depends critically on being able to determine in a valid and reliable manner how much citizens know about politics and to evaluate the consequences of low levels of knowledge on democratic systems.

The evidence presented in this study using the ISSP Role of Government (2006) dataset shows that Czech citizens know most about local and national politics and political players, and are least informed about international affairs. Moreover, the distribution of political knowledge is systematically biased and this results in specific forms of political inequality. It also shows that mobilising effects, level of resources, and cognitive ability, determine level of political knowledge at the individual level. These political knowledge differences also result in differences in the level of constraints between political attitudes with less knowledgeable having less constrained (or structured) attitudes. This threatens the process of political representation as political programmes consist of structured set of attitudes.

Keywords

Political awareness – political knowledge – political attitudes – attitude constraints

Summary

This study analyses the political awareness of Czech citizens, both from the perspective of its distribution within society, its dimensionality, and its sources, and from the perspective of its effect on political attitudes and attitude consistency. The topic is important for political representation. Democracy is assumed to be a project of collective decision-making with informed citizens. Although most theories of democracy only implicitly rest on the assumption that citizens are indeed politically aware, some authors have formulated a catalogue of demands that a regime must meet in order for it to be considered a democracy. Robert A. Dahl, for example, requires that citizens have an enlightened understanding of political problems and have control of the political agenda. Political awareness is essential to meet these requirements. Unequal levels of political awareness lead to real inequalities, where citizens without information are unable and ultimately unwilling to actively participate in the political process.

According to one of the most influential theories of political representation, the Responsible Party Model, citizens are only effectively represented in parliament and government if they are able to (1) articulate their policy preferences; (2) discriminate between political parties and their programmes, and (3) select the party most likely to implement their desired preferences. Empirical research from the 1950s demonstrated that citizens are often uninformed about politics and party programmes and do not have an opinion of their own on important issues. This suggests that political representation is likely to be biased in favour of citizens with higher education and incomes. Whether this is indeed the case critically depends on being able to determine, in a valid and reliable manner, how much citizens know about politics and to evaluate the consequences of low levels of political knowledge for democratic regimes.

The authors use data from the ‘ISSP Role of Government 2006’ to examine the political awareness of Czech citizens and its role in structuring political attitudes on the role of the government in the economy. The authors measured political awareness with two groups of variables: (1) civic knowledge, determined from responses to factual questions about the political process, institutions, and actors; (2) ideological knowledge, examining the ability of citizens to situate themselves and the country’s main political parties on the left/right axis of the political spectrum. Czech citizens are found to be best informed about local and national politics and their actors and least about international politics. Just under ninety per cent of citizens are able to indicate where they stand in the left/right axis, but doing so ‘correctly’ for political parties tends to depend on the objective difficulty of the task: people find it much easier to rank ODS to the right of KSČM than to rank ODS to the right of KDU–ČSL.

Political awareness is unequally distributed in the Czech population and is concentrated among citizens with more resources and higher cognitive ability, and this leads to specific forms of political inequality. Such people are also the most politically active citizens. A multidimensional model shows that the degree of political activity, level of resources and cognitive ability of a person determine the degree of political knowledge at the individual level. A Mokken scale analysis of the dimensionality of political knowledge produced more or less the expected results: political knowledge is not a onedimensional but a multi-dimensional concept, the interpretation of which is complicated. In addition, the actual substance of political knowledge can be influenced by a methodological artefact: how a person responds to the questions. Analyses of the dimensionality of political knowledge confirmed the general assertion that the way in which a person conceptualises and measures political knowledge will determine the findings.

In the second part of the study the authors examine the theoretical foundations of the structure of political attitudes, which they operationalise mainly by means of measuring attitude constraints. Attitude constraint refers to the likelihood that based on knowledge of one political attitude it is possible to predict what another attitude will be. The authors introduce the basic approaches to studying the structure of political attitudes and the constraints between them (Converse, Nie, Achen, Zaller) and then proceed to analyse two scales of attitudes on the role of government in the economy in terms of what variables influence the degree of constraints between these attitudes and an abstract left/right ideological axis.

The authors confirmed basic findings from previous research on the primary role played by political awareness and political involvement. As expected, various operationalisations of political awareness and indicators of political involvement (interest in politics, party identification, participation in elections, party membership) have a linear and positive effect on the level of attitude constraints. Conversely, socio-demographic variables, in particular indicators of social status and class (education, income, occupation, subject class-ranking) had no such effect and the only linearity was in the measured degree of constraints based on the share of ‘Don’t know’ responses.

The study’s analyses showed that differences in political awareness also lead to differences in the structure of political attitudes, with less politically aware citizens having less consistent attitudes. Given that the political programmes of parties are structured sets of political attitudes, these inequalities pose a risk to the process of political representation. An individual’s choice of political party need not mean that he or she agrees with the given party’s set of policies. Moreover, the analyses also revealed that many of the citizens who were unable to answer certain questions instead select a middle response option. If a portion of respondents has no attitudes and an even larger portion does not have consistently structured attitudes, making sophisticated models of electoral decision-making for all respondents is of questionable worth, as the role of the variables can vary significantly by the degree of individual political awareness.