Configurations of political (dis)engagement in post-revolution, post-war Armenia: a person-centered analysis

Mass mobilization in Armenia in 2018 culminating in what became known as the Velvet Revolution was followed by several years of low political participation. This study asks whether that low participation corresponds to a single political disposition or to several. We apply latent class analysis to twelve items from the Caucasus Barometer 2024 survey of Armenia (N = 1,561), related to political interest, institutional trust, perceived fair treatment by the government, internal efficacy and powerlessness, with political actions treated as a distal outcome. Five configurations of political (dis)engagement are identified. The two largest configurations, together 49.5% of the population, show similarly low trust in institutions and differ mainly in political interest and internal efficacy. Seventeen percent of respondents reported any political action, and one third of them came from the more politically interested of the two largest configurations. Comparison with dimensional models could not establish whether the underlying structure is better described as discrete groups or as continuous variation. The contrast between the two largest configurations is based on a two item-measure of interest and needs to be replicated with validated scales. The findings are specific to a single cross-section collected between July and October 2024 in a rapidly changing political context and therefore have limited generalizability to how things stand now. They nevertheless indicate that inaction is internally differentiated, and that person-centered approaches such as LCA can capture subtle distinctions that aggregate measures miss.