Report 2 - Access to Information Review Task Force

CITIZENS' VALUES, INFORMATION AND DEMOCRATIC LIFE

Published: March 2001

Neil Nevitte

Table of Contents

Information and Democracy
Value Change
The Empirical Evidence
Canadian Evidence
Implications
Notes
Sources

Information and Democracy

The proposition that democracies are better served when citizens are informed, and when they are interested and engaged in public life, is well established (Berelson et. al. 1954; Nie et. al. 1996). Each of these elements - information, interest, and engagement - is important for different reasons and they work together in mutually reinforcing ways. Information is sometimes regarded as the currency of democratic life (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996).¹ Armed with information, citizens are better able to make reasoned choices about the political world. They are also better equipped both to mount and evaluate reasoned arguments. Interest is important as a necessary condition - it is interest that supplies the motivation for citizens to go out and acquire information. Disinterested citizens are less likely than others to be informed. Finally, engagement entails forms of citizen behaviour, such as voting, that in advanced industrial states usually signifies expressions of regime support and acceptance of the legitimacy of the political order.

If information is the currency of democratic life, then questions of who holds information, who has access to it, and how widely it is distributed, become central. And it is not difficult to see why these same issues are a recurring thread in different stages of the evolution of modern democratic states.

In the feudal era, only a handful of people qualified as literate; information about the wider world and the state was concentrated in the hands of a very few, mostly the clergy. The transition toward an industrial economy was accompanied by an expansion in the information holding segments of society, a change that correspondingly diminished the information monopoly of the clergy. Industrialized economies cannot "take off", or be sustained, without at least modest levels of literacy, education, and skills in the workforce, and so it is no accident that the expansion of industrial economies throughout the western world was accompanied by the expansion of literacy and education. Industrializing societies became more democratic as a consequence of the combination of structural and value changes, and one of the central outcomes of that transformation was the narrowing of the information gap between elites and citizens.

The transition from industrial to post-industrial societies was accompanied by yet another set of structural and value transformations (Bell 1973; Huntington 1974; Inglehart 1990). Post-industrial societies are usually defined as those states in which more than 50 percent of the paid workforce is employed in technical, professional or financial sectors. Some eight West European economies, as well as both Canada and the United States, crossed that threshold by the beginning of the 1980's. The transformation of these knowledge and information economies was accompanied, once again, by the further expansion of educational opportunities and corresponding increases in the size of the information-skilled work force.

One significant consequence of the transition to post-industrialism is that there is now more information available than ever before. An accompanying structural change, namely the expansion of higher educational opportunities to ever greater segments of the public, is instrumentally important in at least three respects. First, education is a powerful predictor of engagement because it lowers the cognitive and material costs of participation (Wolfinger and Rosenstone 1980). At issue is not just the availability of information, but the capacity to sort through information and to organize it in meaningful ways. A high level of formal education is instrumental because it enhances the ability of citizens to navigate information-rich environments.

Second, higher levels of formal education are associated with so-called 'democratic enlightenment'- those qualities of citizenship that encourage the understanding of, and adherence to, the norms and principles of democratic life. This is instrumental in the sense that higher levels of formal education enable citizens to understand the long term trade-offs in democracy (Nie et. al. 1996).

Third, rising levels of formal education are associated with higher levels of interest in the public world. If interest is vital because it supplies the motivation for people to seek out information, then we expect, first, that demands for information will come from those segments of society that are more highly educated, and second, that the volume of these demands will increase in step with these structural changes.

In some respects, the structural shifts associated with the transition from industrial to post-industrial society can be interpreted as an extension of those that took place with the transition from the feudal to the industrial era. The wide "information gap" that once separated elites from citizens narrowed with the transition from feudalism to industrialism. That gap narrowed even more dramatically with the transition from industrialism to post-industrialism, as has the "skill gap". There is little reason to suppose that contemporary publics - who enjoy unprecedentedly high levels of formal education - are any less able than their counterpart "elites" to acquire information, to organize it, to give it meaning, and to deploy that information in the service of reasoned argument. By these criteria, citizens are more sophisticated than ever before.

Value Change

Precisely what kinds of information citizens seek out depends on what citizens take to be important, or what they value. There is mounting direct empirical evidence that shifts in core values have accompanied the structural transformation from industrialism to post-industrialism. The World Values Surveys and the European Values Surveys are particularly useful data sources because they provide us with directly comparable evidence that, in the case of some Western European countries, goes as far back as the early 1970s.

There are a variety of different interpretations about precisely which values are most central to understanding the transformation to post-industrialism. Some analysts focus on the processes of secularization and "individualization" as the key axis of societal value change (Ester et. al. 1993). Others draw attention to changing authority patterns and the idea of autonomy (Nevitte 1996). These interpretations are not mutually exclusive. Huntington (1974) argues that one central feature of the transformation to post-industrialism concerns the rising salience among publics of the "right to know". In Huntington's view, this right to know is the contemporary corollary of the "right to property" and has become central because transactions in post-industrial societies increasingly concern information.²

Relying on World Values and European Values data, scholars from a variety of countries have documented other value shifts. Using such data from multiple countries over a twenty-five year period, Inglehart and his colleagues argue that there has been gradual displacement of materialist orientations with what are called "postmaterialist" orientations (Inglehart 1977, 1990; Abramson and Inglehart 1995). According to Inglehart, preoccupation with physical and material security is gradually yielding to a focus on "quality of life" issues that give greater priority to "higher order needs".

The Empirical Evidence

The claim that the health of a democracy is enhanced by an informed, engaged and participatory citizenry raises a number of important empirical questions: Just how well-informed are citizens? How engaged are they? Is the holding of information linked to engagement and participation? Precisely what role do citizens' values play? And have values changed?

One of the most striking early empirical findings concerning how well-informed citizens are challenged the idealized image of the democratic citizen that walked the pages of civics texts. According to Converse's early investigations in the United States (Converse 1964), most citizens were not very well informed at all. Moreover, they exhibited remarkably little attitudinal constraint: Converse's subjects had little difficulty in simultaneously holding world views that were logically incompatible and grounded in competing principles.

There are no data available that allow us to directly explore precisely how Canadians view access to governmentally held information but there are available data sources - including the World Values Surveys, Canadian Election Studies, and data held by market research organizations - that do allow us, along with aggregate data, to piece together some reasonable inferences.

The place to start is with structural change. There is ample evidence that, in Canada, access to post-secondary education has increased since the late 1960's, and that the focus of the paid work force has indeed shifted away from manufacturing and extractive activities and toward the provision of professional, financial and knowledge-related activities. These shifts have had significant social and economic consequences, not the least of which includes a wholesale transformation in the gender composition of the paid work force. Canada clearly does qualify as an advanced industrial state. Furthermore, these changes have taken place at approximately the same pace and in the same direction as those in most West European states and the United States.

Secondly, there is a substantial body of evidence pointing to parallel changes in the nature and direction of value changes. To be sure, there are some national variations in the pace of value change and these variations might well be attributable to institutional design and to historical conditions (Inglehart and Baker 2001). But far more striking is the impressive extent to which there are identifiable similarities in basic patterns of value change. The details of these similarities and differences have been extensively reported elsewhere (see Dalton 1988; Nevitte 1996; Halman and Nevitte 1996; Abramson and Inglehart 1996).

Third, one of the key dimensions of value change demonstrated in Inglehart's extensive analyses of the World Values data concerns the apparent shift away from what he calls "materialist" values and toward "postmaterialist" values. Postmaterialist value orientations are systematically and consistently related to education: postmaterialists have significantly higher levels of formal education than their materialist counterparts. They also exhibit higher levels of "interest in politics" and have a much wider repertoire of political action strategies in which they are likely to engage. The core findings concerning the rise of postmaterialist orientations were first reported by Inglehart (1977). The significant point is that subsequent investigations of the same data (and more recent data) independently undertaken by different scholars with different theoretical interests basically support these initial findings (Ester et. al. 1993; Halman and Nevitte 1996; Norris 1999; Kaase and Newton 1997). There are variations in what analysts take to be more or less important, but there is agreement about the essential findings.

The indications are that postmaterialist value orientations are associated with generational change. A cohort analysis of pooled data from a twenty-five year time span indicates that younger cohorts, those who have experienced their formative years during periods of sustained prosperity, are more postmaterialist in their views than earlier generations (Abramson and Inglehart 1995). One possible interpretation is that these data signify life-cycle effects, that is, postmaterialist value orientations among the younger segments of the population simply reflect "youthful" outlooks. But this interpretation does not seem to hold. Certainly, in the early World Values Survey data, there were fairly strong correlations between age and postmaterialist value orientations (Inglehart 1977). But with the most recent European data, the statistical relationship between these value orientations and age are much weaker. In effect, the age-value relationship has flattened out with the passage of time. Postmaterialist orientations are more concentrated among those under fifty years of age while materialist orientations predominate among those over fifty (Nevitte 1996). The more plausible interpretation, then, is that the value shifts do not reflect life-cycle effects. This generational interpretation implies that people will not "grow out of" these orientations. Rather, the implication is that these orientations will be enduring.

Canadian Evidence

1. The Canadian evidence is consistent with nearly all of the findings outlined above. Postmaterialist orientations increased significantly between 1981 and 1990 (Nevitte 1996). In 1981, 16% of Canadians qualified as postmaterialist, increasing to 25% by 1990. And our preliminary investigation of WVS 2000 data for Canada indicates that further increases have taken place (See Figure 1). Canadians are more postmaterialist than ever before and they are more postmaterialist than their American counterparts (Inglehart and Nevitte 1997). Notice also that there has been an even more substantial decrease in the proportion of the population that qualifies as "materialist". In this respect, the Canadian pattern is similar to the West European pattern.
   
   
2. The relationships between these value orientations and education, interest, and participation are also similar to the patterns evident in the European data. Postmaterialists are more highly educated than their materialist counterparts and they express higher levels of interest in public life. Furthermore, they are significantly more participatory when it comes to such activities as joining voluntary organizations, voting, as well as more demanding forms of participation such as signing petitions (Nevitte 1996).
   
   
3. The implication of these findings is that these value changes, which are substantively linked to preferences for "more open government"(Nevitte 1996), are also associated with the skills that lower the costs of harvesting and interpreting information.³ Furthermore, inasmuch as postmaterialists exhibit higher levels of interest in the public world, the implication is that postmaterialists are also more motivated to seek out information.
   
   
4. While at present we have no direct evidence of people's inclinations to seek out information by using Access to Information procedures, there are some data that bear on the distribution of knowledge, and these data clearly shed light on the relationship between knowledge and interest and education.
   
   
5. Cross-time data indicate that, since 1965, levels of interest in politics seem to have increased somewhat. For instance Canadian Election Study data show that about 14% of the population indicated that they were "very interested" in politics in 1974. That increased to about 19% by 1984.⁴
   
   
6. Recently analyzed data from the Canadian Election Study (Nadeau et. al. 2001) indicate that about one quarter of the Canadian population qualify as "informed" and about one quarter are completely uninformed.⁵
   
   
7. An analysis of the statistical relationships between some of the key variables in these data show, as we would expect, that interest is positively correlated with education (r = .2). This means that the more highly educated people are, the higher is their level of interest. If interest provides the motivation to seek out information, then we would expect to find a positive correlation between interest and knowledge or information. In fact, the correlation is positive and strong (r = .32). As we would expect given previous research (Nie et. al. 1996), information is also positively and strongly associated with education (r = .29).
   
   
8. Elsewhere, with cross-time data, we have demonstrated the emergence of what has been called an "efficacy gap" (Nevitte 2000). Canadians are less likely now than before to regard the political system as "responsive" to them (external efficacy). However, the same data show that there have been some increases in internal efficacy, the sense that people have of their own political capacity. The data show that there is a positive correlation between internal efficacy and education (r = .29), and interest (r = .24). Significantly, there is also a positive correlation between internal efficacy and knowledge (r = .2). The more information people have, the more efficacious they feel themselves to be.
   
   
9. To this picture we can add the findings of recent research from the Canadian Election Study (Nadeau et. al. 2001). These data allow us to explore how all of the above variables are related to people's level of satisfaction with democracy. Here the key finding is that education (r = .16), information (r = .13), and interest (r =.15) are all positively and significantly correlated with higher levels of satisfaction with democracy.

Implications

What implications do these findings have for demands for access to information? There are several. First, very recent evidence clearly shows that significant value changes have taken place in the Canadian population and that they extend the trajectory of change first identified from 1981 and 1990 data. It is also clear that these changes are not taking place across all segments of the population in equal measure. The significant point is that they are concentrated more among those who have the highest levels of formal education.

The second point, linked to the first, is that this more highly educated segment of the population has greater interest in public life, and therefore, has greater motivation to seek out information. This is also the same segment of the population that has the greatest capacity to organize information in meaningful ways.

Third, it is the combination of structural and value change that is consequential. Postmaterialists not only give a significantly higher priority to such values as "autonomy" and "more open government", they are also the segment of the population for whom the costs of participation, and effective demand-making are lowest. Furthermore, they are the most inclined to seek out information because it is they who are most likely to want to make "reasoned arguments".

Postmaterialists, then, have significant cognitive and participatory capacity, and they place a higher value on "more open government"; they also exhibit less confidence in particular governmental institutions and are more inclined to believe that governments are unresponsive. But these more critical perspectives do not undermine their evaluations of the workings of democracy. If anything, their levels of satisfaction with the way democracy works are slightly higher than those of their materialist counterparts, or for the rest of the population as a whole.

Notes

(1) "Information" is often used interchangeably with "knowledge", although as some analysts note, it is often useful to make a conceptual distinction. Lupia and McCubbins (1998) argue that information is vital in that it concerns "the facts" that are necessary to build arguments and helps people to avoid mistakes. Knowledge, on the other hand, concerns the ability to predict the consequences of actions (1998:6).

(2) Huntington makes the case that the new emphasis on the "right to know" has its parallel in the "right to property" in the nineteenth century. Just as the right to hold property, and the corresponding sanctity of contracts, was vital to prosperity in the nineteenth century, the right to know carries similar status in knowledge driven societies (Huntington 1974: 165). And just as access to property was the foundation of influence in the nineteenth century, the skills surrounding knowledge acquisition and use - skills that are acquired through access to higher education - are the new foundation of influence in the post-industrial era.

(3) Preference for "more open government" is one item in the scale used to measure postmaterialist orientations. The earliest version of the scale used a four-item index in which people were asked to rank their priorities. Subsequent versions of the scale include a twelve-item version in which respondents were also asked to rank their preference for "more open government". It is not possible to meaningfully compare the relative rankings of "more open government" across the 1981, 1990 and 2000 data sets because the context of the rankings are different.

(4) The question-wording of the measure of interest in politics has changed somewhat since 1984 and so recent data cannot be reliably compared with the data from the 1974-84 time period. Also, the measure became a ten point scale in the 1993 Canadian Election Study.

(5) That is, when given a four item test, about one quarter of all respondents answered all the questions correctly, while one quarter fail to answer any of the questions correctly. There are no significant cross-time data largely because the use of knowledge tests in the Canadian Election Studies is a relatively recent phenomenon.

View Materialism/PostMaterialism in Canada bar graph.
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Sources

Abramson, Paul and Ronald Inglehart. 1995. Value Change In Global Perspective. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Bell, Daniel. 1973. The Coming of Postindustrial Society. New York: Basic Books.

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Dalton, Russell J. 1988. Citizen Politics in Western Democracies: Public Opinion and Political Parties in the United States, Great Britain, West Germany and France. Chatham, NJ: Chatham House Publishers, Inc.

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Halman, Loek and Neil Nevitte, eds. 1996. Political Value Change in Western Democracies: Integration, Values, Identification, and Participation. Tilburg: Tilburg University Press.

Huntington, Samuel P. 1974. "Post Industrial Politics: How Benign Will It Be?" Comparative Politics 6: 147-77.

Inglehart, Ronald. 1977. The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles in Western Publics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Inglehart, Ronald. 1990. Culture Shift In Advanced Industrial Society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Lupia, Arthur and Mathew McCubbins. 1998. The Democratic Dilemma: Can Citizens Learn What they Need to Know? Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

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