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What does “Political” Mean to You?

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Abstract

How do regular people define the term “political”? This original study gives Americans and Canadians an opportunity to express their interpretations of the concept. It identifies a great deal of inter-personal variation in terms of how many and what kinds of topics people perceive as the stuff of politics. And this variation comes in predictable patterns: the findings reveal correlations between socio-political attributes (such as gender, nationality and ideology) and the boundaries people draw around the political domain. The study also provides insight into the ways people distinguish the political from the non-political in their minds. And importantly, individuals’ interpretations of the term “politics” relate systematically to other measures of self-reported political behavior including political interest and frequency of political discussion. These results can be used to refine survey analysis and to broaden knowledge of day-to-day citizen politics.

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Notes

  1. Examples of such questionnaire items include:

    “How interested would you say you are in politics?” World Values Survey.

    “When you get together with your friends, would you say you discuss political matters frequently, occasionally or never?” World Values Survey.

    “How often do you read the political content of a newspaper?” International Social Science Programme.

    “In political matters, people talk of ‘the left’ and ‘the right’. How would you place your views on this scale?” General Social Survey.

    “Dis/Agree: I consider myself well-qualified to participate in politics.” American National Election Studies.

  2. Additional examples of their connection include the Blue Water Beat (an online forum publicizing events on both sides of the border), the two-year Blue Water International Sculpture Exhibit that spans the entire area, the Seaway Sounds Chorus (a singing organization with members from both sides of the bridge), and the presence of local Sarnia radio and television stations on Port Huron dials (and vice versa).

  3. Participants were invited to participate in a “Support your Symphony” survey; no details about the questionnaire were revealed in advance. The survey was administered over two consecutive days in two locations: in Port Huron on Saturday and Sunday mornings and in Sarnia on these afternoons.

  4. Attention to the context created by the survey is in order. All participants were presented with the exact same item list, which could lead to concerns that a shorter list might have generated different outcomes. For instance, results might be influenced by floor or ceiling effects in that such a long list led respondents to think that some—but not all—items must be political. A conclusive response to this concern is not possible with the data here. However, two aspects of the study make this less of a pressing matter than it might otherwise be. First, this is not a representative sample and so it cannot speak beyond the present group of respondents to questions of what, exactly, “political” means in the minds of the masses. Therefore, the stakes of a particular item not being identified as political due to survey design are limited. Second, the main goal of this study is to identify heterogeneity across people in their views of the political. And since the same instrument was used for all participants, this is easier to identify. Still, future use of this instrument should include tests of the survey context’s influence. Another potential concern is that the ordering of items influences people’s choices. To test for this, a simple correlation between the percent of respondents who chose each item and its placement in the list was calculated, showing no significant relationship. Rank-ordering the items by column (assuming people worked downward by column), the correlation is −.05 (sig. = .762). Ranking them by row (assuming people worked from left to right by row), the correlation is −.03 (sig. = .882).

  5. Two versions of the questionnaire facilitated some experimental manipulations, though they do not apply directly to the survey items at hand and they appear after all of the key variable items.

  6. It does not fit the requirements for a poisson model as the variance is greater than the mean.

  7. Exploratory factor analysis (using varimax rotation) identifies the underlying structures of respondents’ item selections. Because the topics listed in the editorial instrument are dichotomous, and because such data is not ideal for factor analysis, an additional component of the survey was integrated into this process. Directly following the topics listing, the survey reads, “Now, of these topics, please rank the three most political.” Responses to this prompt combine with the original variable into an ordered scale: 0 = not political, .5 = political, 1 = one of the most political topics. Topics that did not yield a full range of values (for instance, nobody chose diet pills as a “most” most political topic) were excluded from the factor analysis (omitted topics are italicized in Table 2), leaving 24 items. Given the sample size of 241, this provides an acceptable ratio between respondent and item of 10 to 1 (Everitt 1975; Preacher and MacCallum, 2002). The factor analysis results are in Appendix Table A2. The five reported factors were selected for this further analysis because they had Eigenvalues greater than 1 and at least three variables with loading scores over .5.

  8. Content analysis of the media environment in the week preceding the survey event (conducted December 12–13) reveals that global warming was highly publicized. The 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference took place from December 7–18. Front pages of two US newspapers and two Canadian papers were examined for coverage from December 5–11. The New York Times ran three front-page stories that related to the summit; The Port Huron Times Herald made no mention of it. In comparison, the Toronto Sun published six front-page stories about the conference and the Sarnia Observer ran an article that previewed a local public event planned for December 12 in support of the summit. The summit was big news in both countries and as Fig. 1 shows, it was rated the fourth most “political” topic. But it appeared to be bigger news in Canada. Perhaps as a result, Canadians were especially likely to consider global warming a political topic per Table 2.

  9. Though not investigated here, it is likely the same person would draw on different sets of considerations depending, for instance, on the social or informational context.

  10. Full interactive models are not presented in this paper; they are available from the author.

  11. Vertical bars represent 95 % confidence intervals.

  12. An interactive analysis for partisanship reflects similar patterns but does not achieve significance.

  13. The survey participants were randomly assigned to a set of headlines depending on whether the day of their birth was an even or odd number.

  14. The difference for conflict definers is statistically significant at the .95 level.

  15. Importantly, political interest, attention, disagreement and discussion probably shape people’s conceptualizations of the political. As such, no directional, causal claims are advanced here.

  16. Importantly, a number of strategies exist for boosting validity of survey items, particularly when administering cross-national studies. See Davidov et al. (2011), Jowell et al. (2007) and Reeskens and Hooghe (2008).

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Acknowledgments

This research was made possible by an Innovative Seed Grant Award from the Vice Chancellor of Research at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The author thanks Ceren Altincekic, Vanessa Baird, Andy Baker, Anne Brown and the ISO, Hilde Coffé, Amber Curtis, Fay Fitzgerald, Dawn Kindsvater, Anand Sokhey and Jennifer Wolak for their various contributions to this project.

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  1. Department of Political Science, University of Colorado at Boulder, 333 UCB, Boulder, CO, 80309, USA

    Jennifer Fitzgerald

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Appendix

Appendix

See Appendix Tables A1, A2, A3.

Table A1 Absolute estimates of key variables’ substantive impact
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Table A2 Factor analysis
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Table A3 Key survey items (in order of survey appearance)
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Fitzgerald, J. What does “Political” Mean to You?. Polit Behav 35, 453–479 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-012-9212-2

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