right or wrong answers.
Having an opinion on issues: In some surveys voters are asked about their opinion and
often voters fail to give an opinion and use the “don’t know” or the “no answer” option. I
will use this source and hypothesise that voters who can give an opinion whatsoever will
be cognitively more involved than voters who fail to express an opinion.
These two measures can be seen as directly linked to an issue. Since the number of ques-
tions in some of the votes vary and because the questions that have been asked vary as well, I
have standardized the two components. The two indicators varied between 0 and 2 each (with
a total of 4) where 2 was full information and 0 was no information at all.
Social determinants of information and participation
The possible social determinants of turnout and information will be needed to assess
whether condition 1 as indicated in the theoretical section of this paper is fulfilled. This condi-
tion states that in order for low turnout and poorly informed citizens to be problematic for
democracy, there has to be a systematic social bias in who participates and who is well in-
formed.
I will use different social indicators in a regression model (see summary in table 1). This
will include age, sex and education as very common social characteristics which indeed are
cleavages in political issues. However there needs to be an indicator of “class” as well, since
lots of the literature is referring to a class bias in participation. There is a wide range of ways
how to measure social class in survey research. Since I could not choose how this was meas-
ured the last 25 years in the Swiss surveys, I will have to draw on whatever indicator on the
social position of an individual is available. I will use various characteristics as predictors of
class. The first will be income but this has only been added in some of the more recent sur-
veys. I will use the profession of a respondent or of the head of the household if the respon-
dent is not working full time which allows to separate between farmers, self-employed, em-
ployees from private sector and from public sector, workers (and others). In some of the ear-
lier surveys there is a distinction between employees in more senior position or employees in
more junior levels instead of the distinction of private/public sector employee. As a further
indicator I will use whether the respondent lives in house or in a apartment block, assuming
that living in a house indicates rather wealthy people. And as a similar indicator about living
conditions I will include whether somebody rents or owns a place which is a valid indicator
because in Switzerland the percentage of people that rent is very high and way above 50%
8
Convention