Does Local Level Participation Fosters Democratic Attitudes? The Evidence from an Individual Level Survey in the Czech Republic

From the perspective of the participatory theory of democracy, the local level participation is the key to developing democratic attitudes of citizens. Local-level participation is assumed to have a beneficial educational function. Also, it is believed that the higher the local participation the higher the citizen trust not only to local institutions but also to central state one. Furthermore, citizens who participate more on the local level should be less inclined to political dissatisfaction and alienation. In the time of the rise of populism, the local level participation might be the cure for the low level of citizens’ internal perceived political efficacy. To sum up, the higher the local level participation the better. However, most of the research underestimates the modification effects of another individual level as well as higher-level contextual variables. First, the effect of the local level political participation on democratic attitudes might be moderated by the level of individual political knowledge or other individual-level predictors such as individual socioeconomic status (SES). Second, we can assume the contextual effect of the municipal size and sociodemographic of the region. Therefore, our aim is to investigate if and how the political participation on a local level affects the democratic attitudes of citizens. We use unique individual-level data survey (a representative sample of 1022 respondents) that was initiated by the Palacky University and realized by the Public Opinion Research Centre (Sociological Institute of the Czech Academy of Science). The survey was constructed as a post-election survey at the end of the year 2018 when the local elections were held. We have included several important batteries of question on concepts such as political dissatisfaction, trust to the institution, political alienation, internal and external efficacy, inclination towards populism and questions on attitudes to democracy together with question on perceptions on the state of the Czech local democracy and the citizens´ knowledge of local democracy. To probe our research questions, we use two sets of methods. First, the hierarchical regression models are used to investigate individual-level variables as well as second-level contextual variables (on the district, regional level). Second, because the above mentioned political concepts are endogenous, that means that are interrelated and hardly separable, we employ structural equation models (SEM). For example, attitudes towards democracy are affected by political participation, political efficacy or political participation at the local level. All concepts are highly correlated, hence we cannot analytically separate the dependent and independent variable. Yet the method is able to measure the moderating effect, the direct effect and indirect effect of variables on democratic attitudes. Lastly, we test models for four groups of citizens: participating in both the central state and local level, participating only on the local level, participating only on the state level, non-participating at all. The preliminary results is that the positive attitudes towards democracy are not directly related to political participation but conditioned by political knowledge (of both the local politics such as names of councilors or mayors as well as general political knowledge on Czech political system).