Engaging in the world: Investigating the factors that promote civic engagement across 34 countries

Abstract

This thesis investigates the effect that a variety of demographic, educational, cognitive, and health-related variables have on civic engagement. Civic engagement is defined as a combination of frequency of volunteering and feelings of political efficacy. International survey data from 34 countries are used to provide a cross-national view of the predictors of civic engagement. We use canonical correlation analysis to investigate the widespread effects of predictor variables on both facets of civic engagement (volunteering and political efficacy) and the effects that are linked to only one facet. Furthermore, we use country-level socio-demographic data to link patterns of civic engagement of potentially marginalised groups to the representation those groups have at the community level and the political level. Our results highlight the importance of cognitive skills and skill building resources in supporting engaged citizens: literacy skill, numeracy skill, educational attainment, and number of books in the home are found to be strong predictors of civic engagement across all countries. The present thesis contributes to knowledge by employing a common measure of civic engagement across all countries, using an analysis method that allows and accounts for variance shared by multiple facets of civic engagement, and by investigating civic engagement across a wide variety of countries.