Political Participation and Opinion-Policy Congruence

• In Event: Fun Papers on Democratic Responsiveness

Abstract

Although non-electoral participation is an important way for citizens to engage with and influence their democracy, those individuals who participate in this way are generally less satisfied with their democracy. This means that it is not clear whether those who engage in non-electoral political participation generally receive more of their preferred policies, compared to those who do not. In this paper we address this question by examining whether political participation is associated with higher opinion-policy congruence, through three analyses. First, we examine data from the European Social Survey and the International Social Survey Programme, sampling a wide range of policy issues, to study policy preferences at the group level (activists and non-activists). We pair this data with information on policy implementation and find that those who participate in politics through non-electoral avenues receive more of their preferred policies compared to those who do not participate. Second, we dissect this data to examine which issues and which contexts are driving this pattern. Lastly, we examine opinion-policy congruence in regards to issue-specific political participation at the individual level and control for political knowledge as well as sociodemographic variables. The overall result show that political activism is consistently associated with higher levels of opinion-policy congruence in different issue domains. Furthermore, political knowledge and other sociodemographic characteristics cannot explain the observed unequal representation between those who participate in politics through non-electoral avenues and those who do not.

Authors

• Jesper Lindqvist, University of Gothenburg

• Jennifer Oser, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel

• Mikael Persson, University of Gothenburg

• Anders Sundell, University of Gothenburg

• Ruth Dassonneville, Universite de Montreal