Politiskt självförtroende och samhällsdeltagande : En kvalitativ studie av begreppet politiskt självförtroende i kombination med en kvantitativ analys av dess effekter på europeiska ungdomars deltagande i samhället.

This thesis is about the effect of political efficacy on societal participation among youths aged 15 to 29. It takes a starting point in the gloomy view of the decline of political participation among citizens in the western world, especially pointing out youths as a threat to democracy. This is a broad subject to take on so my aim becomes a bit more specific. The aim of the thesis is therefore to investigate if belief in ones own capacity and in the responsiveness of the political system affects the actual participation among youths in Europe, independent of a set of alternative predictors. Moreover the thesis is divided into two sub-investigations, one qualitative and one quantitative. The qualitative part discusses and analyzes the concept of political efficacy in a new and broader way outlining two dimensions of the concept, internal and external political efficacy. Using the modified definition of political efficacy the quantitative part provides an analysis of the effects of internal and external efficacy on societal participation among youths. This analysis is done in three steps. First four theoretical groups are derived from the two dimensions of political efficacy and then these are analysed against a set of control variables and three forms of societal participation, lawful public demonstration, contacting a politician or public official and buying a product for certain political, ethical or environmental reasons (“buycott”). Secondly a set of logistic regressions are performed analysing the effect of each dimension of political efficacy on the three forms of societal participation controlling for six alternative predictors (the control variables). Lastly the effects of each dimension of political efficacy are compared to see if different dimensions of political efficacy affect different forms of societal participation. The result shows that it is primarily the internal political efficacy that has effect on societal participation; there are significant results of the logistic regressions on all three forms of participation. As for the external political efficacy it only appears to have effect on “buycott”. However the model for the regressions did not show significant model-fit for the analysis of lawful demonstration. The main conclusion is that both dimensions of political efficacy affect societal participation but it is hard to say whether the different dimensions clearly affect different forms of participation