Citizenship and Awareness: Exploring Political Awareness, Skills, Cognition and Preparation for Action

Abstract

Political awareness is often defined as: ‘‘the extent to which an individual pays attention to politics and understands what he or she has encountered ’’ (Zaller 1992, 21). From the groundbraking work of Zaller Political awareness plays a significant role in people’s political orientation. We argue that political awareness is not only directed at elections and political parties but a wide range of political aspects. From a vide range of aspects we propose that awareness of ‘issues’, political parties, personal characteristics of politicians, political debates/cleavages and the results of politics is of significance in order to capture peoples political awareness. We also decided to distinguish between people’s attention to politics, how people assess their political knowledge and their actual understanding of political matters.