The increased availability of the Internet has led to the emergence of new forms of political participation. Opinions differ, however, on whether this has led to a reinforcement of stratification patterns or to the political mobilization of new groups in society. To address this question, the authors conducted a latent class analysis of a U.S. representative sample that indicates that online activism is indeed a distinctive type of political participation. Analysis of the sociodemographic stratification of the identified participation types confirms the mobilization thesis regarding age and gender but finds that traditional socioeconomic status inequalities are reinforced in online political participation.

Various authors have claimed that citizenship norms have changed dramatically in contemporary societies. Recent research has studied the implications of Russell Dalton's argument that dutybased citizenship norms (emphasizing voting and obeying the law) are being replaced by engaged citizenship norms (emphasizing self-expressive and non-institutionalized forms of participation). In this article we use the 2009 International Civic and Citizenship Education Survey (ICCS 2009, n=140,650) to ascertain the cross-national empirical validity of engaged and duty-based norms. By means of latent class analysis, we show that both of these citizenship norms are indeed adhered to by different groups of adolescents. We also show however that only half of the research population holds these two norms, while other more traditional norms are also identified. The findings confirm expectations that high-status respondents with low political trust are more likely to adhere to engaged norms, but the country-level findings contradict expectations, showing that engaged norms are less prevalent in highly developed stable democracies, and this casts doubts on the hypothesis that new engaged citizenship norms are predominantly found in stable highly-developed democracies.

Scholars have recognized that a recent increase in the ways citizens participate beyond the electoral arena may be a promising avenue of renewal for citizen participation. In this article we test the theory that different kinds of citizenship norms motivate some citizens to specialize in electoral-oriented activities (e.g. voting), while others specialize in non-institutionalized activities (e.g. protest). The latent class analysis of data from the U.S. Citizen, Involvement and Democracy Survey (2005) in the current study assesses how actors combine a variety of acts in their “political tool kits” of participation, and facilitates a comparison to prior findings that analyze single political behaviors. Results indicate a participatory type that specializes in non-institutionalized acts, but the group’s high probability of voting does not align with the expectations in the literature. An electoral-oriented specialist type is not identified; instead, the findings show that a majority of the population is best characterized as disengaged, while a small group of all-around activists embrace all possible opportunities for political action. The actor-centered theoretical and measurement approach in this study identifies caveats to the theory that changing citizenship norms are leading to civic and political renewal. We discuss the implications of these findings for measuring different aspects of democratic (dis)engagement and participatory (in)equality.

Various authors claim that citizenship norms are changing rapidly in advanced democracies, leading to a stronger emphasis on self-expressive engagement and a decline of notions of civic duty. In this article, we compare results from two comparative surveys of adolescents: the 1999 Civic Education Study and the 2009 International Civic and Citizenship Survey (ICCS). By using latent class analysis we identify duty-based and engaged citizenship norms, both in 1999 and in 2009. As expected, the group supporting duty-based citizenship norms is clearly smaller in 2009 than in 1999, while the opposite is true for the group supporting engaged citizenship norms. In contrast to expectations, the empirical evidence also distinguishes additional normative concepts, and shows that the distribution among countries is not according to the dynamics on value change as suggested in the literature, including a decline in engaged norms in Scandinavia and Western Europe.