‘Policy-feedback effects’ and cross-national variation on levels of political membership in Europe

Mettler and Soss (2004) have developed a framework for pursuing ‘policy-feedback effects’ in the arena of mass politics. Their main hypothesis is that public policies affect citizens’ attitudes and behaviour: the way citizens view themselves and others, as well as their understanding of the political system in which they live. More specifically, Mettler (2002) posits that policies produce resource and interpretative (a kind of psychological predisposition) effects that modify the civic capacity and predisposition of beneficiaries, and thus, influence civic and political engagement. In this paper the hypothesis of policy feedback effects (in particular, the interpretative dimension) will be tested for accounting the cross-national variation of a specific type of political activity: membership in political groups (unions, parties, ''new politics'' organisations such as NGOs, ecological groups and so forth). In Europe there exists an outstanding variation in the levels of political membership being Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands on the top and Southern and Eastern European countries on the bottom. The interaction among citizens themselves and with different political institutions influences citizens’ conceptions and ideas of what can be expected from their respective political systems. Citizens’ decisions of joining political groups or remaining inactive will be mediated by their perceptions of the political world. These expectations are shaped, among other factors, by the generosity of the welfare state and its redistributional capacity, as the results of policies are linked with the perception that political elites and civil services behave correctly and are accountable to citizens. Hence, in societies where institutions and political elites are distributing resources and are held accountable to citizens and their demands, the level of public confidence in these fairly efficient institutions is expected to increase. Consequently, more citizens will believe that it is worthwhile to become involved in political organisations and, therefore, high levels of political membership are expected. In contrast, in polities where there is a high inequality of access to political opportunities and resources combined with a widespread perception of institutions as inefficient, one might expect to find low levels of political membership. These hypotheses will be tested through a multilevel analysis of political membership among those European countries with data available at both levels of analysis. At the macro-level, selected indicators from the Comparative Welfare States dataset will be used. At the individual level, the data from the 2008 European Social Survey (ESS R4, with a specific module on welfare attitudes in a changing Europe) will be used. It will include socio-demographic variables, attitudes towards Welfare politics (more specifically, evaluation of task performance), and political attitudes used as proxies of levels of political accountability (external political efficacy and institutional trust). The dependent variable will be political membership (in the following type of groups: unions, trade unions or ‘new politics’ organisations). References mentioned: Mettler, S. 2002. “Bringing the State Back in to Civic Engagement: Policy Feedback Effects of the G.I. Bill for World War II Veterans.” American Political Science Review 96: 351- 365. Mettler, S. and J. Soss. 2004. “The Consequences of Public Policy for Democratic Citizenship: Bridging Policy Studies and Mass Politics.” Perspective on Politics 2/1: 55-73.