Patterns of (de)politicization in times of crisis: Swiss residents' political engagement, 1999–2020

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Version: Final published version
License: CC BY 4.0
Serval ID
serval:BIB_52CC68D5A313
Type
Article: article from journal or magazin.
Collection
Publications
Institution
Title
Patterns of (de)politicization in times of crisis: Swiss residents' political engagement, 1999–2020
Journal
Frontiers in Political Science
Author(s)
Marquis Lionel, Kuhn Ursina, Monsch Gian-Andrea
ISSN
2673-3145
Publication state
Published
Issued date
13/10/2022
Peer-reviewed
Oui
Volume
4
Language
english
Abstract
We explore period, cohort and age e􀀀ects on political engagement of Swiss residents from 1999 to 2020. A particular focus lies on the impact of the successive crises democratic societies have faced in recent years, such as the economic and debt crisis, refugee crisis, climate change, terrorist attacks or COVID-19 pandemic. We review the literature on the potential of such
large-scale external events for both politicization and depoliticization. We then draw several hypotheses, which we test empirically. We consider several dimensions of political engagement (interest in politics, party identification, participation in popular votes, political discussions, and political trust), and seek to explain their variation over time, using data from the Swiss Household Panel. Our results suggest that “troubled times” have little effect on political engagement overall, but that crises stimulate political discussions and trust in
government in the short term. We further find increasing levels of political trust in the longer run, which might reflect a cumulative effect of the various crises. In contrast, we find steadily declining levels of traditional forms of political engagement, namely party identification and participation in popular votes, as well as interest in politics. For cohorts, we find a U-shaped association between generations and political engagement. An exception to this pattern is political trust, where we observe a small but steady increase from older to newer generations. For age, we observed a monotonic increase of political engagement with age for all indicators. Again, trust in government somewhat deviates from other forms of political engagement, as it first decreases in the younger age groups and then increases from the age of 40 onwards. In conclusion, we discuss some implications of these complex patterns of results for the future of democratic systems.
Keywords
political engagement, political interest, party identification, participation, political trust, discussions, politicization, Switzerland
Open Access
Yes
Create date
13/10/2022 21:43
Last modification date
14/10/2022 5:39
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