Attitudes towards Citizen Participation in Elderly People

Abstract

Empirical evidence has traditionally indicated that older people have more unyielding attitudes towards political and social participation. However, it is still an inconclusive area of research, due to the methodological impossibility of simultaneously taking into account the joint effects of age, political generation membership, and the period under consideration. This study addresses these issues by treating age not as a continuous variable, but as a group variable, and using five quasi-longitudinal samples from the World and European Values Surveys and the CIS Data Bank, covering a period of almost 30 years. The results show that, when these effects are simultaneously controlled, the life cycle is not an explanatory factor for attitudes towards citizen participation.