Abstract
What are the respective consequences of individual citizens’ confidence in representative and regulative institutions and authorities? In the fourth chapter of his book, Schnaudt analyzes whether the attitudinal and behavioral consequences of citizens’ confidence in representative and regulative institutions and authorities are the same or rather different ones. According to the author, despite recurring lamentations about a lack of research on the implications of political confidence, so far much more effort has been spent on investigating the antecedents of political confidence rather than its consequences. In order to alleviate this omission from the literature, Schnaudt examines the respective influence of confidence in representative and regulative institutions and authorities on citizens’ support for different models of democratic citizenship as well as citizens’ political participation. Relying on individual-level data from the European Social Survey (ESS), the author shows that confidence in representative institutions and authorities fosters citizens’ support for a participatory model of citizenship, whereas confidence in regulative institutions and authorities increases citizens’ support for a representative model of citizenship. Contrary to more recent findings in the empirical literature, Schnaudt’s analysis concerning the behavioral implications of political confidence shows that neither confidence in representative institutions and authorities nor in regulative ones exerts an impact on citizens’ institutionalized or non-institutionalized political participation. The fourth chapter thus provides novel insights into both the attitudinal and behavioral implications of political confidence, in particular in those instances in which the author is able to demonstrate varying consequences of confidence in representative and regulative institutions and authorities.
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Notes
- 1.
A more detailed discussion of the consequences of political confidence for citizens’ political participation will be presented in Sect. 4.2.
- 2.
See also footnote 8 in Sect. 3.1.1.2.
- 3.
For the inspection of causal or two-way relationships with cross-sectional data, methods of instrumental variable regression have been developed. However, a sensible and fruitful application of instrumental variables regression in practical research is oftentimes complicated or even rendered impossible by the many (statistical) assumptions and conditions such methods imply and call for (for an overview, see Solvey and Green 2011).
- 4.
An alternative argument would state that exactly in those instances in which citizens feel that political institutions and authorities are not responsive to their participatory activities and demands, they will support the norm of getting involved themselves even more strongly. From this perspective, lower levels of political confidence should come along with higher support for the participatory model of citizenship.
- 5.
The control variables used are: age, gender, education in years, social trust, satisfaction with life, satisfaction with government, satisfaction with democracy, internal efficacy, political interest, political news consumption on TV (hours per day), left-right placement, and religiosity (see also van Deth 2012, pp. 376–378; Zmerli 2010, p. 665; Denters et al. 2007, p. 99).
- 6.
For the bivariate relationships between the one-dimensional conception of political confidence and support for the representative and participatory models of citizenship, see Table 3.2 and our discussion on page 30.
- 7.
For the bivariate relationships between the two-dimensional conception of political confidence and support for the representative and participatory models of citizenship, see Table 3.4 and our discussion on page 33.
- 8.
For the bivariate relationships between the typology of political confidence and support for the representative and participatory models of citizenship, see Table 3.8 and our discussion on page 42.
- 9.
As in the preceding Sect. 4.1, political confidence will thus be treated as independent variable, whereas political participation serves as dependent variable in the analysis.
- 10.
Based on theoretical arguments and empirical findings within the broader literature on political participation, these additional factors include age, gender, education in years, employment status, internal and external political efficacy, political interest, left-right placement, and social trust (cf. Verba et al. 1995, pp. 269–273; Armingeon 2007, pp. 361–367; Booth and Seligson 2009, pp. 152–153; Hooghe and Marien 2013, p. 140).
- 11.
The existence of a U-shaped relationship is indicated by a positive and statistically significant coefficient for the squared term for political confidence and a negative coefficient for the main effect of political confidence. To verify the existence of a U-shaped relationship, citizens’ predicted probabilities for political participation have been plotted against their political confidence scores (results not shown here).
- 12.
Looking again at the results of the present study as shown in Table 4.9, it is indeed evident that for the pooled sample 7 out of 12 hypotheses find empirical confirmation (see the entries marked with an asterisk, but see also footnote 13).
- 13.
This assertion is also substantiated by the findings of the present study. In the very few cases in which political confidence exerts a statistically significant impact on political participation in our country-analyses (see Table 4.9), its effect sizes are only modest. For comparative purposes, the effect sizes of political interest as the most consistent and strongest antecedent of political participation are at least three times bigger in most of the cases (detailed results not shown).
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Schnaudt, C. (2019). Consequences of Political Confidence. In: Political Confidence and Democracy in Europe. Contributions to Political Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89432-4_4
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