Knowing and distrusting: how political trust and knowledge shape direct-democratic participation

ABSTRACT

This article examines how factual political knowledge and political trust shape direct-democratic involvement in the form of supporting citizens’ initiatives in Finland. Previous studies have debated the relative merits of cognitive mobilization and political dissatisfaction as predictors of support for direct democracy. This study builds on these efforts, but it extends the scope of analysis to examine reported participation in rather than support for direct democracy. The study relies on data from the most recent round of the Finnish National Election Study from 2015 (FNES2015) to study these questions with binary logistic regression analyses. The results suggest that both factual political knowledge and political trust have the expected relationships with direct-democratic involvement. However, their effects are stronger when they interact and pull in the same direction to shape the propensity of involvement. This indicates that proposals for citizens’ initiatives are generally the work of knowledgeable, but critical, citizens.

KEYWORDS:

• Citizens’ initiatives
• political trust
• political knowledge
• direct democracy
• political participation
• democratic innovations

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Henrik Serup Christensen is Academy Research Fellow in political science at Åbo Akademi University in Turku, Finland. His research interests include political behaviour broadly defined and the implications for democracy. In his current research project, he examines how the introduction of democratic innovations affects political legitimacy.

ORCID

Henrik Serup Christensen http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2916-0561

Notes

1 Although Parliament has so far only approved a single initiative, the instrument has been well received and became a popular tool for venting political preferences (Christensen et al. 2017).

2 For more information on data collection and access to data, see https://services.fsd.uta.fi/catalogue/FSD3067?tab=description&lang=en&study_language=en

3 This risks excluding aspects that are not reflected in factual knowledge such as logical reasoning. Another possibility would have been to include other aspects such as education as part of a broader measure of cognitive abilities. However, this would make it impossible which of the elements were the most important aspects. Hence, since previous studies suggest that the current approach is the best available approach to measuring the most important aspects of political knowledge (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1993), the index is only based on the factual knowledge questions while education is included as a control variable.

4 To verify the results, the analyses were rerun with the original coding of the dependent variable in four categories and logistic ordinal regression. The main findings were similar with the exception that political trust did not have a significant negative association with the depending variable when controlling for other factors (B = −0.71, p = .060). The substantive interpretation nonetheless remains similar since the significant interaction effect entailed that the strength of the association depended on knowledge. These analyses are not reported in the text since the interest there lies mainly in manifest involvement rather than attitudes to using the initiative, but the results are shown in the Online Appendix.

5 Some control variables are related to the two main theoretical approaches of political dissatisfaction and cognitive mobilization. For example, education may be conceptualized as an indicator for cognitive mobilization and satisfaction with democracy concerns political dissatisfaction (Dalton et al. 2001). The reported results therefore capture the independent contributions of factual knowledge and political trust rather than assess the validity of each of the theoretical approaches. Preliminary examinations indicate that similar findings exist for other indicators as well, but to explore this in more detail is beyond the scope of the present study, which focuses on the two central variables for greater clarity. This raises the risk of multicollinearity affecting the results, but since all VIF scores are below 2.0 (see Appendix), there is little reason to expect this to be the case. Furthermore, the analyses verify that the main effects are stable across different specifications of the models, increasing the belief in the validity of the results. Other control variables were tested such as voting for opposition parties, but since they did not affect the implications of the main results and their implications were unclear, these results are not presented in the text, but are in the Online Appendix.

6 The total number of signatures collected on the website www.kansalaialoite.fi at this point was about 1.3 million, which equal about 31% of the Finnish electorate (4.2 million). Although there is still a risk of measurement error, this suggests that the survey does reasonably well in capturing the actual extent of involvement since the official figures and the survey results are broadly similar. Weighting the data to more accurately reflect the official register data is not a viable option since there is no way of knowing how many people contributed to amassing the 1.3 million signatures.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Kulttuurin ja Yhteiskunnan Tutkimuksen Toimikunta [Grant Number 285167].