A conceptual map of political participation

Abstract

How would you recognize a mode of participation if you see one? Owing to the rapid expansion of political activities in the last decades this question has become increasingly difficult to answer. Neither the development of all-embracing nominal definitions, nor deductive analyses of existing modes of participation seem to be helpful. In addition, the spread of expressive modes of participation makes it hard to avoid purely subjective definitions. The aim of this discussion paper is to develop an operational definition of political participation, which allows us to cover distinct conceptualizations systematically, efficiently and consistently. This goal can only be arrived at if the conventional approach of presenting nominal definitions to solve conceptual problems is left behind. Instead, available definitions are included in a set of decision rules to distinguish three main variants of political participation. A fourth variant is distinguished for non-political activities used for political purposes. Together, the four variants of political participation cover the whole range of political participation systematically without excluding any mode of political participation unknown yet. At the same time, the endless expansion of the modes of political participation in modern democracies does not result in an endless conceptual expansion. Implications for research and various examples are discussed.

Towards a Conceptualization of Young People’s Political Engagement: A Qualitative Focus Group Study

“…All participants differentiated states of political engagement and political participation, which leads to the open debate about how to conceptualize political engagement and political participation (e.g., [16,18,34,46]). Is political engagement the same as political participation?…”

“…Some researchers have already identified how young people think about and engage in politics-leading to the emergence of significant paradigm controversies concerning differences between political 'participation' and 'engagement' (e.g., [15][16][17][18]). Following debates on young people's apparent lack of political engagement, there has been discussion concerning the validity and reliability of the instruments used in such research.…”

Relational goods and overcoming barriers to collective action

“…This has been formulated as the question: "Is clicking the "like" button political participation?" (van Deth 2014, Theocarcis 2015. While these points surely have merit, they do not encompass the full import of the digital space.…”

Determiners of Citizen Participation at Local Level in Poland

“…Political participation as a research problem Currently, the modern scholarly approaches as well as particular case studies are more often discussed in English language publications (Verba, Nie, 1972;Barnes et al, 1979;Duch, 1998;Dalton, 1998;Inglehart, Catterberg, 2002;Barnes, 2006;Bernhagen, Marsh, 2007;Ekman, Amnå, 2012;Lamprianou, 2013;Van Deth, 2014).…”