A bird's eye view of civic engagement and its facets: Canonical correlation analysis across 34 countries

ABSTRACT

Civic engagement is a multi-faceted concept that is integral to the proper functioning of a democratic society. The present study investigates the effect that a wide range of individual-level demographic, educational, cognitive, and health-related predictors have on civic engagement and its facets, providing an overview of 34 countries around the world. The use of canonical correlation analysis allows us to quantify both the shared and unique contribution of the predictors to two facets of civic engagement, voluntary work and political efficacy. The common scale of the analysis provides an intuitive visualization of barriers and pathways to one's engagement in the community and society at large. We further ground our findings in country-level socio-demographic data, providing external validation to our method.

KEYWORDS:

• Civic engagement
• volunteering
• political efficacy
• cross-national
• participation

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of the manuscript.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Joseph Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarships-Master's award (Battershill), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Partnership Training Grant 895-2016-1008 (Libben, PI), the Canada Research Chair (Tier 2; Kuperman, PI), and the Canada Foundation for Innovation Leaders Opportunity Fund (Kuperman, PI).