Future Orientation and Political Participation: The Moderating Role of Political Trust

Mikkel Stein Knudsen,Henrik Serup Christensen

doi:10.3389/fpos.2021.791467

Abstract

Previous studies show consistent differences in how people evaluate future consequences and implications of this for a variety of phenomena. The implications for the individual propensity for taking part in different forms of political participation have received limited scholarly attention, however. This is unfortunate since it affects how people voice their concerns over future problems and thereby also whether and how decision-makers become aware of these concerns. We here examine this in a cross-sectional study conducted in Finland (N = 1,673). We apply the Considerations of Future Consequences (CFC) framework as a measure of individuals’ future orientation and distinguish between considerations of future consequences (CFC-future) and considerations of immediate consequences (CFC-Immediate). We study the direct associations with institutionalized and non-institutionalized political participation and the moderating role of political trust in shaping these associations. Our results show CFC-future has a positive association with both institutionalized and non-institutionalized political participation, while CFC-immediate has a negative association with participation. Political trust moderates the association with non-institutionalized political participation since the association is stronger for citizens with low political trust. This may suggest that citizens use particular participatory avenues to communicate their worries over future problems, and to which decision-makers must be attentive.

Highlights

Aesop’s famous fable of The Ant and the Grasshopper crystallizes the impact of time perspectives: The grasshopper spends the summer singing, while the ant stores up food for winter
Our results show that the relationship between Consideration of Future Consequences (CFC)-Future and non-institutionalized participation is moderated by political trust, which entails that it is only for people with low levels of political trust that CFC-future increases the likelihood of participation
We here focus on the links to political participation between elections, and our empirical results show that these two dimensions have disparate associations with institutionalized and non-institutionalized forms of political participation

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Aesop’s famous fable of The Ant and the Grasshopper crystallizes the impact of time perspectives: The grasshopper spends the summer singing, while the ant stores up food for winter. Higher levels of CFC-Future have been found to correlate with a higher stated propensity for taking a COVID-19 vaccine (Ma and Ma, 2021) This article uses this most recent CFC-14 scale for examining links between future orientation and political participation and the moderating role of political trust. We examine the links between the CFC-Future and CFC-Immediate scales and institutionalized and non-institutionalized political participation in a large-scale survey of citizens in Finland. This is to the best of our knowledge the first article to use the CFC-scale in connection with political participation between elections, as well as the first large-scale temporal orientation-political participation survey study outside the United States. This thereby suggests that there is no reason to believe that those participating in noninstitutionalized political actions are less invested in the future than those participating in more institutionalized forms are

BACKGROUND

RESULTS

DISCUSSION

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT