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Political participation in European countries: The effect of authoritarian rule, corruption, lack of good governance and economic downturn

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Comparative European Politics Aims and scope

Abstract

Two decades after democratic transition, political participation levels in Central and Eastern Europe remain significantly lower than in Western European countries. Although some authors invoke the socialization of citizens under authoritarian regimes as a cause, others hint at the fact that these countries still experience corruption, lack of good governance and low levels of economic development. In this article, we test both theoretical claims, by conducting a multilevel analysis on the full sample of the European Social Survey in the period 2002–2008, introducing a distinction between institutionalized and non-institutionalized forms of participation. The analysis demonstrates that, controlling for all relevant individual level characteristics, an authoritarian legacy, the perception of corruption, bad governance and low income levels have a negative impact on participation levels. Controlling for corruption levels and lack of good governance, the effect of an authoritarian legacy is rendered non-significant. An analysis by age and cohort suggests that the effect of current experiences with corruption are more powerful than the effect of an authoritarian legacy. As such, our findings support the claim that especially bad governance and corruption have a strong negative impact on civic engagement in Central and Eastern Europe.

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Notes

  1. This limitation allows us to use a coherent sample. Of the 27 member countries of the EU, only Malta did not take part in ESS. Non-EU-member countries like Ukraine, Israel, Turkey and the Russian Federation were not included in the analyses, since a number of the participation variables are not strictly comparable in these countries. We used the cumulative file of round 1 to 3 (version 1.0) and version 3.0 of the fourth round. In an alternative operationalization, the analysis remained limited to the countries that participated in all four waves. As this analysis was based on a more limited number of cases, stability of the models was weaker, but the analysis did lead to the same conclusions.

  2. http://www.transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/cpi/2009/cpi_2009_table.

  3. http://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/index.asp

  4. We can note that while some of these individual level variables might seem related at first sight, correlation remains limited so there is no danger of multicollineartiy, as could be observed from the low VIF scores.

  5. Kendall Tau-b's correlation between political television use and institutionalized (r=0.061; P<0.001) and non-institutionalized (r=0.031; P<0.001) political participation (dummy).

  6. Note that this is a different question than the one used to create the dependent variable (e.g. worked for a political party), but both questions are highly correlated (r=0.436; P<0.001).

  7. Factorscale, measured by how religious are you, how often attend religious services apart from special occasions, how often do you pray apart from at religious services (explained variance: 65.418; Eigen-value: 1.963).

  8. It has to be noted that in general the individual level effects do not change all that much as a result of the inclusion of the country level variables. Full models (individual and country level combined) available from the authors.

  9. A more fine-grained distinction into smaller age groups confirmed this finding.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Citizenship and Democracy, University of Leuven, Park Street 45, Leuven, B-3000, Belgium

    Marc Hooghe & Ellen Quintelier

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  1. Marc Hooghe
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  2. Ellen Quintelier
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Appendix

Appendix

Tables A1, A2 and A3

Table A1 Descriptives of the variables used in the analysis
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Table A2 The level of institutionalized political participation in the different countries over time
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Table A3 The level of non-institutionalized political participation in the different countries over time
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Hooghe, M., Quintelier, E. Political participation in European countries: The effect of authoritarian rule, corruption, lack of good governance and economic downturn. Comp Eur Polit 12, 209–232 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/cep.2013.3

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