The Link Between Political Participation and Life Satisfaction: A Three Wave Causal Analysis of the German SOEP Household Panel

Abstract

Is there a relationship between political participation and individual life satisfaction? The idea that political participation makes people more satisfied with their lives has long been debated. However, the existing empirical research has not been very successful in demonstrating that such a relationship exists while some studies show that instead it is individual life satisfaction that impacts political participation. This paper aims to shed some light on the issue of causality between political participation and individual life satisfaction. Unlike former studies, we resort to panel data and apply a three wave model which allows us great flexibility to test several hypotheses. Also unlike previous studies, after correcting for measurement error, our analysis shows no compelling evidence of a causal relationship between political participation and life satisfaction.

Appendices

Appendix 1: Political Participation Construct Validity

The most suitable test of the validity of the items proposed to measure political participation is construct validity. Therefore, we will compare the correlations of our proposed participation measure and other measures of concepts that are theoretically expected to be related with political participation.

For the case of political participation, the variable selected from the SOEP data to test construct validity is the following: Generally speaking, how much are you interested in politics? (1) Not at all; (2) Not so much; (3) Much; (4) Very much.

This question is a measure of political interest. It should be correlated with political participation, measured here by the frequency of reported political activities. We expect that the higher the political interest of the respondent, the higher the frequency of political participation actions the respondent will declare to have participated.

Political interest	Wave 1	Wave 2	Wave 3
Political participation	0.2414*	0.2574*	0.2278*
N	20,214	18,917	20,059

1. * Significant at the 0.05 level

We see a moderate positive correlation between political participation and political interest in all waves included in our study, as it was initially expected. In order to assess further the validity of our political participation measure, we decided to put together a Civic Participation index, which consists of one item asking if the respondent was a member of a trade union and another item regarding membership of professional associations, generated from the first wave of the SOEP data used in this paper.

In the table below we can see that the correlation of civic participation with political interest is weak and much weaker than the correlation of our measure of political participation with political interest. We can then reasonably assume that our measure of political participation and this measure of civic participation are measuring different things, therefore reinforcing our confidence in the validity of the political participation measurement.

	Political interest
Civic participation	0.1506*
N	19,930

1. * Significant at the 0.05 level

Appendix 2: Summary/Descriptives of Variables

Wave	Variable	Mean	SD	Min	Max
2007	Political participation	0.107	0.382	0	3
	Life satisfaction	6.933	1.782	0	10
	Education	3.671	1.434	1	6
	Income	2.898	2.198	1	10
	Unemployed	0.680	0.251	0	1
	Partner	0.610	.487	0	1
	Prof. ass. ss	0.077	0.267	0	1
	Other	0.358	0.479	0	1
	Environment	0.043	0.203	0	1
2008	Political participation	0.138	0.424	0	3
	Life satisfaction	6.968	1.758	0	10
2009	Political participation	0.110	0.384	0	3
	Life satisfaction	6.966	1.785	0	10

Appendix 3: Correction for Measurement Error: Quality Coefficients and Error Variances

	Quality coeff.	Source	Error variance (1 − q2)
Endogenous variables
Life satisfaction 2007	0.736	SQP own coding	0.338
Life satisfaction 2008	0.736	SQP own coding	0.459
Life satisfaction 2009	0.736	SQP own coding	0.338
Political participation 2007	0.814	SQP own coding	0.459
Political participation 2008	0.814	SQP own coding	0.338
Political participation 2009	0.814	SQP own coding	0.459
Control variables
Education	0.898	Alwin (2007, p. 328)	0.102
Income	0.777	Alwin (2007, p. 328)	0.223
Unemployed	0.677	Alwin (2007, p. 328)	0.177
Partner	0.966	Alwin (2007, p. 328)	0.017

Social membership	Loadings
Member of other types of associations	1.00
Member of a Environmental association	0.66** (0.04)
Member of a professional association	1.00** (0.05)