Political awareness, dimensionality, engagement and citizenship.

This panel addresses the dimensionality and measurement of political awareness (PA) and its relation to citizenship. Political awareness is understood as a ‘reservoir of predispositions’, which citizens use to understand political messages communicated in public, in interpersonal relations and discussions and active participation in political affairs. Political awareness is closely related to how people engage with politics and choose to participate. How people are aware of and see themselves in relation to the field of politics may also express how they choose to live their political life as citizens. The current article explores how we should understand political awareness and develops three dimensions which we argue are built into the concept. First PA describes citizens attention to information in the sphere politics, second citizens political knowledge and finally their understanding of the field of politics. The method used is quantitative with a questionnaire to 260 students in upper secondary school in Norway and Denmark. The analysis is confirmatory factor analysis using IBM SPSS/AMOS. The findings support a four-dimension factor solution where the knowledge factor is divided in two parts. The factor solution and PA’s relation to political citizenship is then discussed.