Political Participation: A Latent Variable Approach. Testing Measurement Equivalence of Political Participation Using ESS Data

Theoretical definitions refer to political participation as multi-faceted. While some authors introduce up to twenty different kinds of behavior to measure political action, political participation is measured in surveys like ESS, WVS or EVS by a limited number of activities. Most of the researchers of political participation use composite scores for measuring political participation. The main aim of this research was to test (i) “whether political participation can be measured as a latent construct?” and (ii) “is this construct measurement equivalent across different countries or different time points?” Using the 5th round of ESS data and the alignment procedure, I measured cross-country comparability of political participation as a bi-dimensional construct with 2 latent factors: institutional and non-institutional participation. Results showed that for the vast majority of ESS countries, the data reflect the theoretical construct of political participation. Furthermore, I compared between the time points within each country and I found that, with few exceptions, the ESS countries show temporal invariance regarding the political participation construct. Both results suggest that political participation can be treated as latent variable and allow us further cross-cultural comparisons.