The importance of "civic literacy" to making democracy work

Research shows that PR electoral systems, public financing of campaigns and robust public media are better at helping people to make sense of their political world

[DemocracySOS welcomes back Canadian political scientist Henry Milner as a guest contributor. Professor Milner has been on the faculty of Vanier College in Montreal and at Umea University in Sweden, and has been a visiting professor or researcher at universities in Finland, Norway, France, Australia and New Zealand. He is currently a Research Fellow at the l’Université de Montréal, where he is at the Chair in Electoral Studies in the Department of Political Science. He is also co-founder of “Inroads: the Canadian Journal of Opinion,” and has written numerous articles, both scholarly and journalistic, specializing in political participation and electoral reform. He is author of eleven books, including his recent political memoir “Participant Observer: An Unconventional Life In Politics and Academia,” in which he tells about his eventful life as an academic on several continents, a party leader in Quebec, and a student and community activist in the 1960s and 70s after being born in a bunker in American-occupied Germany. Insider-outsider, observer and participant, academic and activist, his is a “political autobiography of a generation.” Thank you Henry for this contribution.]

[Here is a link to Part II of Henry Milner’s articles about his work on Civic Literacy: Political misinformation, voter turnout and electoral reform]

Like many others, I have been increasingly concerned with the impact of political misinformation on our democracies. The internet has proven to be a game changer in terms of allowing malevolent actors to widely disseminate distorted news and conspiracies. Politicians like Donald Trump have used digital media platforms to great effect, continually attacking opponents and rallying supporters with unproven claims about things like stolen elections. Recent innovations in AI development such as GPT-4, deep fakes and other digital technologies augur a potential escalation of this alarming trend.

In light of these developments, I have decided to revisit the findings from my academic work on the comparative analysis of democratic participation. The research was built around what I termed “civic literacy.” Civic literacy is the knowledge and capacity of citizens necessary to make sense of their political world. Individuals differ, but so do societies. Those with high degrees of civic literacy are ones in which citizens have sufficient knowledge of the issues of the day, which allows them to identify the impacts that specific policy options will have upon their own interests and those of their community.

This research, which was reported on notably in my 2002 book Civic Literacy: How Informed Citizens Make Democracy Work, showed that not only are “civically literate” individuals more likely to vote and otherwise take part in politics, but that this positive relationship between political knowledge and voter turnout is reproduced cross-nationally. When my co-researchers and I compared countries regarding levels of civic literacy, that is, the proportion of their citizens with the minimum levels of political knowledge needed to make effective political choices, we found a close positive relationship between levels of civic literacy and rates of various forms of political participation, notably reported voter turnout.

How to understand decline in the democratic world

The wider context for this civic literacy research was the secular decline in the democratic world in the late 20th century of the sense of a public duty to vote and participate as a citizen. In the absence of such a sense of duty, the political knowledge dimension of voter participation became increasingly salient, not only among students of politics but more widely. An important contribution to that understanding was Robert Putnam’s analysis of declining “social capital” in his book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. My own research, using comparative data built on insights by Putnam and others about the impact of political institutions and the media, shows how civic literacy, beyond stemming the secular decline in political participation, could enhance economic performance and social justice.

In seeking to compare institutional arrangements in democratic countries as to their impact on civic literacy, I stressed the effects of civic education on political knowledge and political participation, on the one hand, and that of the role of political institutions in that relationship on the other.

The work contributed to a wide literature linking electoral institutions and turnout. One study I conducted for International IDEA examined differences in turnout level for voters between the ages of 18 and 29 in fifteen Western European countries in the late 1990s. It showed that in countries using proportional representation (PR) electoral systems, the average youth turnout rate was almost 12 percentage points higher than in non-PR countries.

The main contribution of my research was to show that a key missing link between political/electoral institutions and political participation was that of civic literacy. A study with Andreas Ladner from the University of Lausanne applied the Gallagher Index of Disproportionality to general election results from 1945 to 1996 to education-related dispersion of political knowledge (from the CSES: Comparative Study of Electoral Systems). We found a strong linear association: as electoral outcomes become more proportional to the popular support attained by political parties, political knowledge becomes less dependent on formal education. Put otherwise, proportional voting systems made a measurable difference in increasing levels of civic literacy, regardless of the levels of formal education.

It proved more difficult to test the relationship to civic education. By raising levels of civic literacy, it is fair to assume that better and more civic education will enhance political participation, both quantitatively and qualitatively. However, efforts to empirically test the effects of civic education on civic literacy and political participation were held back by the absence of comparative data on civic education. This was something I, in the end unsuccessfully, sought to overcome, seeking research support for an international study to develop and apply the equivalent of Gallagher’s index to rate countries’ effectiveness in providing civic education.

I thus turned to comparative indicators of reading literacy per se, on the premise that, other things being equal, civic literacy and reading literacy are necessarily linked. The study defined literacy as the ability to read and understand the written material encountered in everyday life in a modern society as set out by the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS), comparing countries as to the proportion of adults unable to do so.

US near the bottom of international measurements

Americans consistently performed at or near the bottom of these measurements.  I found that the peoples of Scandinavia and northern Europe to be, on average, the most informed, not only about their own domestic politics, but also about international affairs. I argued that the robust and comprehensive nature of northern European media and communications institutions, when combined with public financing, free media time for campaigns and parties, universal/automatic voter registration, and proportional representation electoral systems, contributed to this greater degree of civic literacy.

In more recent work, I have explored the generational aspect of the combination of declining political attentiveness, knowledge and participation, as well as the sense of civic duty to vote. Recent generations have reached maturity in the world of the Internet and of digitalized information, one in which the shared social and informational network provided by the geographical (and political) community is increasingly replaced by an individualized virtual one, composed of persons – and soon AI bots – that are both geographically and psychically distant.

Taking into account this context, in a follow up to this article I will return to the analysis of civic literacy and its relevance to political participation today, starting from, as noted at the outset, the observable discontinuity between political information and political choice in the United States.

In so doing I will revisit my findings from my work on the comparative analysis of democratic participation. I ask whether the increasingly salient dimension to this relationship that has been emerging from the (American) literature, namely of the politically uninformed being replaced by the politically misinformed, significantly changes the underlying relationship between political knowledge and participation and, if so, its wider implications for the future of democracy.

Henry Milner