Types of Political Participation

Objectives

• [ ] Political Participation
• [ ] Participatory Democracy
• [ ] Associational Democracy
• [ ] Contemporary Trends in Political Participation
• [ ] Value of Citizen Participation

Levels & Types of Participation

Defining Political Participation

• The active engagement by individuals and groups with the government process that affect their lives.
• Encompasses both involvement in decision making and acts of opposition.
• An active process; one may be a member of a party or pressure group, but play no active role in the organization.
• Acts of active engagement include conventional political participation or unconventional acts, which may be seen as legitimate.

Various normative conceptualizations related to participatory democracy

• Normative theory of participatory democracy as ‘New Left.’
  • This promotes a ‘direct participation of citizens in the regulation of the key institutions of society, including the spheres of work and the local community’ (D. Held, 1997), or ‘the participation of citizens in the determination of the conditions of their associational lives, which presumes the authentic and rational nature of the judgements of each individual.’
• Partial participation: The final power of decision rests with the management, the workers if they are able to participate, being able only to influence that decision.
• Full participation: A process where each individual member of a decision-making body has equal power to determine the outcome of decisions.

Participatory democracy

• Increasing participation by the excluded is necessary to introduce new and important issues into the political debate.
  • This creates the need for citizens to self-organize.

Associational democracy

• Associational experiences in civil society are here considered not only capable of replacing the state in some functions, but also to produce social solidarity, contributing to the democratic socialization of the citizens as well as to the production of social goods.

Contemporary trends in political participation due to social change

In an authoritative survey of the impact of recent social change upon political participation in Western liberal democracies, the following trends were identified (Dalton, 1996):

1. An increasingly informed and critical citizenry
2. A decline of trust in the effectiveness of political elites and institutions
3. A drop in turnout rates in elections
4. An increase in unconventional political participation

The value of citizen participation and democracy

• Citizens are increasingly willing to involve themselves in politics.
• Participation is cumulative in its positive effects on citizens’ ability to participate.
  • It is through such participation that rights and responsibilities of citizenship can be reconciled.
  • Without a pervading sense of active participation, citizenship becomes merely a passive status that fails to empower the individual.
• Only by decentralizing decision-making processes can citizens have the opportunities to perform their responsibilities and make use of their rights.
• It is mistaken to take the view that representative and direct forms of democracy are binary opposites.
  • Any effective system of democracy is likely therefore to combine more citizen-centered involvement with more proportional, devolved, and accountable representative bodies in the context of a constitution that defends basic rights and gives form to a variety of levels and types of political participation.
• Maximizing and intensifying the political involvement of citizens serves the wider purposes of cementing civil society together and educating citizens in the art of democratic governance.

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