Historical Events’ Impact on Political Engagement: Quasi-experimental Evidence

• In Event: Political Engagement in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

Historical events have been found to have significant impacts on the content of people’s politics, but we know much less about whether they can also restructure broader political behaviors and orientations. I seek to contribute to fill this gap by examining historical events’ impact on the levels and social disparities of everyday political engagement. Drawing from political perception and environmental citizen competence studies, I argue that due to socioeconomic and life-cycle differences in levels of political interest and environmental diagnostic use—the degree to which someone uses cues from ongoing political environments to generate political inferences—historical events produce political engagement increases that are larger and socioeconomically equalizing for young adults and more moderate and unequalizing for the rest of the population. I provide empirical support for this proposition by evaluating differences between West Germany and France in variations before and during the German Reunification period (Nov ’89-Dec-’90) in the performance of age and socioeconomic attributes as regressors of political talk. I show that this comparison fits quasi-experimental conditions addressing history and ambiguous causal precedence validity issues affecting current event-based studies by developing an original quantitative indicator of historical contingency and deploying it to inspect the evolution of this temporal property in West Germany and France in the vicinity of German Reunification.

Author

• Sergio Galaz García, Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas