The aim of the presented research was to test the relationship between basic beliefs about a religious object (Transcendence, God) operationalized by Hutsebaut and various forms of civic engagement. In discovering these relationships, the mediating role of prayer importance, understood as an indicator of the strength of commitment to the relationship with God, was taken into account. In the study conducted with 535 young adults, the following tools were used: Post-Critical Belief Scale, Civic Engagement Questionnaire and Prayer Importance Scale. The results showed that social activities were more strongly associated with beliefs accepting the existence of God, while political activities were more strongly linked with attitudes rejecting the existence of God. Prayer importance was shown to mediate the relationship between beliefs accepting the existence of God and social activities and to increase the strength of service-oriented activities.

Presented article attempts to show sense of life perspective as a determinant of decision making. It is assumed that the sense of life perspective described as life attitudes is significant in assessment of decision problem defined in the predecision phase of the decision making process. The predicted dependence was analysed in three categories of decision: self-development, financial and voting. The research was conducted on two groups of 186 and 86 participants. Two methods were used in the research: the Life Attitude Profile -Revised (LAP-R) and the Decision Assessment Questionnaire. In statistical analysis, the canonical correlation analysis was used. The scores show that the life attitudes (especially: Purpose, Coherence, Life Control and Existential Vacuum) are correlated with the assessment factor (especially: Cognitive Analysis and Affective Assessment) of each tested category of decision. However, the most significant relationship is found in the self-development decision

This article aims to examine the relationships between various forms of civic engagement and values, using a four-form model of civic engagement and the Shalom Schwartz model of values. The forms of civic engagement are social involvement, social participation, individual political activity, and political participation. The study was conducted on a sample of 203 respondents from various regions of Poland. The regression analysis revealed that the different forms of civic engagement were explained by a specific set of values. Service-oriented activity (social involvement and social participation) was more strongly associated with values than political activity. Poland is characterized by the insignificance of universalism in explaining various forms of civic engagement, while power and security are important in explaining individual political activity. The article also outlines the limitations of the current study and provides directions for future research.

The local elections that were held in November 2014 stirred up considerable controversy in Po-land. The article is an attempt to describe how Poles evaluated the overall functioning of democ-racy in the context of these elections and what determinants significantly contributed to that evaluation. We examined three levels of democracy evaluation: general beliefs (Jost’s system justification), the current state of democracy (Dahl’s democratic institutions), and specific events connected with the functioning of the democratic system (the quality of the elections and the level of trust in the elected representatives). We also tested the extent to which these levels of democracy evaluation were explained by sociopolitical determinants, such as the general level of trust in people, patriotism and nationalism, or the experience of security. The study was conducted shortly after the second round of the election on a sample of 524 subjects. The obtained results show a low quality of democracy (particularly on the level of general beliefs and trust in the newly elected authorities) and reveal associations between aspects of evaluation and the investigated determinants.

This article is an attempt to empirically establish a new category of social beliefs defined as postmodern beliefs. They are cognitive categorizations of social and media messages regarding ways of understanding the world which are based on the basic assumptions of postmodernism, quite widely recognised as fundamental. The theoretical model adopted in the article assumes the existence of three beliefs: antifundamentalism, absolutization of freedom and relativization of truth. The hypothesised concept was operationalized as Postmodern Beliefs Questionnaire (PMBQ). Verification studies were carried out on three groups of over 600 people. The verification of the tool was carried out by using exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to select the appropriate pool of statements, then data in two subsequent datasets was analysed using Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) to empirically verify the selected set of statements and estimate relevant parameters. The tool constructed allows for investigating the distinguished beliefs at a satisfactory level of reliability and validity. It can be used to measure the extent to which the representations that make up the popular understanding of postmodernism have been recognised and built into the overall belief system about the world of the respondents. The distinguished postmodern beliefs differ in terms of relations with other social beliefs of the respondents, such as anthropocentrism, traditionalism, faith in a just world, as well as the attitude of individuals to material values or their individualistic orientation.