Political Alienation: A Conceptual Framework and its Implication to Democracy

How should we define citizens estranged from politics who doubt that their participation matters and that the system plays by legitimate rules? Political sociology has referred to this phenomenon as alienation, yet the literature lacks a precise identification of necessary dimensions within the multidimensional framework, and explicit boundaries distinguishing alienation from related phenomena. This paper offers a conceptual reassessment of political alienation. In this paper, I define political alienation as a durable condition of estrangement from the political system that arises when citizens embrace perceptions of powerlessness and normlessness towards the system. The concept is non-compensatory; political alienation occurs only when both dimensions are present, as a strong sense of one cannot offset the absence of the other. The paper further draws a theoretical distinction between politically alienated citizens and adjacent groups, such as critical and populist citizens. The analysis of the European Social Survey (Round 11) indicates that this conceptualisation classifies approximately 40\% of Europeans as politically alienated, a proportion that remains stable across survey rounds. Politically alienated citizens evaluate the democratic system considerably more negatively and are markedly less likely to vote, showing that political alienation results in both attitudinal estrangement and behavioural withdrawal.