Category Archives: Survey Variables: Political Engagement

By contrast with their generally left-leaning positions on questions relating to the economic dimension of ideology, people give less consistent answers in relation to the social dimension of ideology. As we can see from Figure 1 (above, using weighted data), people are strong divided over the use of the death penalty (panel B), quite dividedContinue reading “Survey Variable: Social Dimension of Ideology”

People’s ideological beliefs are an important factor in their political engagement and can influence not only whether but also how they get involved in politics. Such Ideological beliefs are often organised along two dimensions relating to economic views (state intervention and redistribution versus private enterprise and inequality) and social views (authority versus liberty), and theContinue reading “Survey Variable: Economic Dimension of Ideology”

In addition to their appraisals of their own political knowledge, people’s actual political knowledge can also be important for political participation. As with self-perceived political knowledge and understanding (or lack thereof), actual political knowledge (or lack thereof) might motivate (or inhibit) political action. This might be in terms of being able to converse with othersContinue reading “Survey Variable: Political Knowledge”

Two possible, related barriers to people’s engagement with, and participation in, politics are how easy they find it to understand and how much they think they know about it. If politics is seen as complicated and involving knowledge that is not readily available to them in their day-to-day lives (or that they do not thinkContinue reading “Survey Variable: Perceived Understanding and Knowledge of Politics”

Beyond taking an interest in politics, we might think of discussing it as the next step in political engagement. Indeed, we could reasonably go as far as to describe discussing politics as a political act, given that it involves interacting with others and can often have an element of trying to persuade them of something.Continue reading “Survey Variable: Discussion of Politics”

Beyond asking about whether people think politics is for people like them, and whether they think of themselves as political, the survey also asked about whether they are interested in politics. These are all distinct questions, but people’s answers are likely to be closely related. It is worth asking all of them, however, so thatContinue reading “Survey Variable: Political Interest”

In addition to asking whether ‘politics is for people like you’, the survey asked each respondent whether they consider themselves to be a ‘political person.’ These two questions both focus on people’s relationship with politics but the second shifts the focus from the general accessibility of the system to individual dispositions. The order of theContinue reading “Survey Variable: Political Person”

There are numerous ways to ask about people’s political engagement and how they think politics relates to them. Two of the most straightforward questions in this area ask about whether people think of themselves as political, and whether they think politics is for people like them. The survey asked both of these questions and randomiseContinue reading “Survey Variable: Politics for You”