How to Enhance Constitutional Consciousness?

Abstract

This study investigates the effects of direct democracy and freedom of the press on constitutional and political awareness. For the data collection, we employed an online questionnaire distributed to 400 college students selected proportionally from six universities in East Java, Indonesia. Further, partial least square (PLS) was used to analyze the obtained data (392 or 90%). Our finding suggested that direct democracy and freedom of the press have significant and immediate effects on constitutional awareness, but they do not affect constitutional awareness. Besides, direct democracy and press freedom significantly and indirectly affect constitutional awareness through political awareness. This finding indicates that the enhancement of society's constitutional awareness can be completed by improving press freedom and the society’s direct democracy and political awareness.