Testing the Relationship Between Contacting Politicians and Education in Different Political Contexts

According to different surveys, one of four people contact politicians to express their views and influence politics. Yet, we do not know much substantially of this type of political participation. A few studies suggest that contacting politicians, compared to other forms of participation, could require different resources and skills, depending on a context citizens are embedded in (Van Deth 2014, Teorell et al. 2007, Lussier 2013). We know from Western based literature, that education is essential for facilitating political participation, including contacting, by stimulating political interests and civic skills (Brady et al., 1995). But do similarly characterized citizens (e.g. on the same level of education) differ in their inclination to contact politicians, based on the national political context there are embedded in? More specifically, we ask how does democraticness predict the relationship between contacting politicians and education? For answering this question, we use a pooled POLPART mega dataset, which consist of the waves of surveys’ datasets from the European Social Survey, United States Citizenship, Involvement, Democracy (CID) Survey, the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP), the Afrobarometer, the Asian barometer, and the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP). Together, these datasets include information about the contacting activities of approximately 745 000 respondents in more than 100 countries around the world. This huge mega data set gives us a unique opportunity to analyse contacting in different surveys/continents, and compare them, taking into account individual and country-level factors. In the analysis, we apply a novel methodological approach. We implement the two-stage individual patient data (IPD) meta-analysis. First, we estimate the effect of education on contacting in each country-year separately and use it as a dependent variable, thus controlling for individual-level (composition) effect. Second, we test a set of contextual variables (level of democraticness, corruption, GDP) on the relationship between contacting and education for each country-year. The general conclusion is that in more democratic, less corrupt countries, on individual level education is positively related to contacting politicians, while we do not find this relationship in less democratic and more corrupt societies.