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

Abstract

We explore period, cohort and age effects 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.

Young People's Attitudes towards Democracy and Political Participation: Evidence from a Cross-European Study

“…Scholars have shown that young citizens are more active in non-conventional forms of participation according to different levels of ‘biographical availability’ (Beyerlein and Bergstrand 2013; McAdam 1986). 2 Overall, positions in the life cycle and access to resources have been shown to favour young citizens' political participation (Lorenzini et al 2021; Marquis et al 2022).…”

“…Beyond the well-known effects of inequalities and life-cycle events such as school transition, starting a family or entering the labour force, young age groups could also exhibit divergent patterns of attitudes of opposition to democracy because they have experienced different social, economic and political opportunities that are dependent on broad contexts (Grasso et al 2019), especially in their formative years. Experiences of socioeconomic turmoil can leave a deep imprint on young people's political socialization, attitudes and broader democratic engagement (García-Albacete and Lorente 2021; Marquis et al 2022). Moreover, young people who have come of age in periods of heightened social unrest – as was the case during the Great Recession – are more likely to have a common understanding of their political environment (Giugni and Grasso 2019; Grasso 2014; Lorenzini et al 2021), combining high levels of dissatisfaction with political (dis)engagement in the long term (García-Albacete and Lorente 2021).…”