Political Alienation: A Conceptual Framework and its Implication to Democracy

Citizens increasingly feel estranged from democratic actors, institutions, and processes, which constitutes a pressing challenge in contemporary politics. Despite its potential to illuminate the roots of this estrangement, political alienation has received limited scholarly attention. This estrangement is multidimensional, rendering the concept both critical and under-theorised. Existing research often emphasizes the impact of constructs such as populist attitudes, political trust, and political efficacy. However, these do not fully capture the depth of estrangement that political alienation possibly represents. Although frequently interconnected in the literature with other concepts, political alienation should be considered a distinct attitudinal dimension that influences contemporary political dynamics in democracy independently. Drawing on illustrative cases from previous scholarship on political alienation, this paper proposes a conceptual approach to measuring political alienation and outlines dimensions and indicators for future empirical research. By clarifying conceptual boundaries and suggesting measurement scales, this paper aims to enable precise analyses of citizen estrangement and disengagement and to address the challenges these phenomena pose to democratic legitimacy.