Some politics is local: the determinants of engagement in local and national politics across Europe

João Cancela

doi:10.36253/qoe-9530

Abstract

Understanding the roots of political engagement has been one of the critical tasks performed by students of comparative political behaviour. This paper adds to the literature by examining the determinants of political discussion about local and national affairs in Europe. A series of multilevel logit models are fitted to the data (n = 28,563 from 31 European countries) to test the individual and country level determinants of political discussion about local and national matters. At the individual level, we find that gender, the type of community, the type of civil society organisations people are members of, and their level of education affect the type of politics they engage with. At the macro level, citizens from countries with a higher economic development are more likely to engage in discussions about national affairs, while the impact of local government autonomy does not seem to make individuals more likely to engage in discussions about local politics. The findings suggest that if local politics is considered the share of politically disengaged citizens can be smaller than is typically estimated. The full range of democratic practice may thus remain underappreciated if non-national politics is left out of the picture in the study of political engagement.

Highlights

The intensity and scope of citizen engagement in established democracies has been one of the major topics of concern in the field of comparative political behaviour in recent decades (Lijphart 1997; van Deth 2014)
This raises the possibility that the overwhelming majority of respondents state the same frequency of discussion for both national and local politics, which would challenge the relevance of testing the determinants of engagement separately
The proportion of those in the sample reporting a higher interest in local politics (14.6%) exceeds, even if by a small margin, those reporting a higher interest in national politics (12.6%)

Summary

Introduction

The intensity and scope of citizen engagement in established democracies has been one of the major topics of concern in the field of comparative political behaviour in recent decades (Lijphart 1997; van Deth 2014). Citizens have grown increasingly disaffected from their political systems and are less prone to engage with politics than they once were. This growth in political detachment has been considered one of the main symptoms of the malaise that has affected several democratic polities in recent years (Mair 2013, 43). Other authors counterargue that there are currently more ways of participating in politics than in earlier decades (Dalton 2014) Per this account, the case is not so much that citizens are becoming detached from politics; instead, they have found different, previously unavailable ways of expressing their stances that go beyond the traditional realm of conventional participation. There is a considerable theoretical and practical interest in understanding what can lead to a larger portion of citizens becoming more engaged with their political systems

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