Democratic Political Efficacy in Europe: Individual and Cross-Cultural Differences

We aim to analyze the state and trends of democratic political efficacy in Europe. First, we considers problems of conceptual definition of democratic political efficacy and suggest that minimally defined democratic political efficacy combines two types of attitudes: support for certain core democratic values and sense of internal and external political efficacy. While the concept of political efficacy is defined following the traditional approaches (see Campbell et al. 1954; Balch 1974; Craig, Maggiotto 1982; Acock, Clarke, Stewart 1985; Craig, Niemi, Silver 1990; Niemi, Craig, Mattei 1991), the core democratic values are defined following the prerequisites of liberal democracy identified by Diamond and Morlino (2005). These authors identified five procedural, two substantive and one results oriented dimensions of (representative) democracy. Consequently, high support for democratic values and high political efficacy characterize individuals with high democratic efficacy and low support for democratic values and low political efficacy describe individuals with low democratic efficacy. Empirically, we investigate the trends of democratic political efficacy in a temporal and comparative European perspective using data from the ‘Citizenship’ module of the ISSP. In order to address individual and macro level factors influencing democratic political efficacy we employ multilevel regression analysis: on the individual level we include variables reflecting individual political skills/resources, media use, education, income and place of residence, and on the macro level – indicators of political, educational and media institutions, socioeconomic development and cultural value orientations.