Språk och politik – En kvantitativ studie om språkkunskaps påverkan på politiskt deltagande i afrikanska länder

Sammanfattning: This essay studies the effect that proficiency of an official language has on political participation. It is a quantitative study focusing on 36 African countries. Our theory stipulates that a lack of proficiency acts as a cost in a rational choice-model of political participation. The hypothesis is that the quota of official language-speakers in a country positively affects the country's level of political participation. The method used is OLS regression analysis. The dependent variable consists of an index of political participation, constructed from questions from the survey institute Afrobarometer and voter turnout in the latest parliamentary election and the language-variable is calculated using data from the annual reference publication Ethnologue and the World Bank development indicators. Our results indicate, contrary to the hypothesis, that language doesn’t have an effect on political participation. However, the limited data that is used in the study makes it hard to draw any certain conclusions.