Lecture 9 (Political Science)
Conceptualizing Political Participation and the Participatory Repertoire
Political participation is fundamentally defined as citizens' activities affecting politics. While this definition serves as an intuitive starting point, the conceptual boundaries chosen to define participation carry substantial empirical consequences. Scholarly definitions range across a spectrum from strictly narrow to comprehensively broad. The analytical choice between a restrictive or an expansive scope dictates the empirical inferences drawn regarding whether democratic participation is in a state of terminal crisis, experiencing a secular decline, or adapting through novel modes of civic engagement. Within empirical political science, research on political activism is systematically structured around three central inquiries: the specific repertoires through which citizens participate, the underlying motives and sociopolitical processes that drive engagement, and the systemic consequences of these participatory acts.
An exhaustive catalog of participatory activities is virtually infinite because an action is rendered political largely through the subjective meaning and intent that social actors attribute to it. Participatory acts span conventional, institutionalized forms—such as voting in elections, demonstrating, contacting elected representatives, attending party rallies, signing petitions, and volunteering—to unconventional, non-institutionalized, or lifestyle-driven forms. Contemporary non-conventional practices encompass guerrilla gardening, political blogging, organizing flash mobs, posting ideological content on social media platforms, participating in boycotts, and engaging in "buycotts" through the deliberate consumer purchase of ethically sourced or fair-trade products.
To synthesize this vast universe of actions, political participation is conceptualized as an integrated repertoire uniting all available forms of action within a polity. This repertoire incorporates routine, institutionalized behaviors that generally operate without collective contention—such as voter registration, attending voluntary associational meetings, reading and publishing newspapers, and petitioning public officials for constituency favors. Simultaneously, the repertoire encompasses contentious politics, formally defined by Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow as episodic, public collective interactions among makers of claims and their objects when at least one government is a claimant, an object of claims, or a party to the claims, and the claims would, if realized, affect the interests of at least one of the claimants.
The Typology of Action: Contention, Collective Action, and Politics
The analytical universe of public action is delineated by the intersection of three distinct spheres: contention, politics, and collective action. Disaggregating these domains clarifies how different acts relate to political participation:
PURE CONTENTION: Involves disruptive friction or conflict that lacks both collective organization and political objectives. Everyday examples include interpersonal violence, such as throwing a stone at a neighbor, hurling an insult, or purchasing non-political commercial advertisements.
PURE POLITICS: Operates strictly within the political domain without requiring collective mobilization or disruptive contention. Casting a ballot in an election represents the archetypal institutionalized political act performed individually within an established legal framework.
PURE COLLECTIVE ACTION: Manifests when individuals coordinate shared efforts toward non-contentious and non-political ends. Illustrative examples include organizing a neighborhood festival, participating in an apolitical parade, or founding a local book club.
CONTENTION AND COLLECTIVE ACTION (NON-POLITICAL): Emerges when coordinated groups engage in disruptive dispute against non-state targets without seeking governmental intervention. This dynamic is observed in organized consumer boycotts against private corporations, local collective resistance against the construction of a corporate data center, or rivalries between sports supporters.
POLITICS AND CONTENTION (INDIVIDUAL): Features highly contentious, politically motivated acts undertaken outside of collective coordination. Examples include an individual publishing an adversarial op-ed targeting state officials, or extreme acts of protest such as political self-immolation, exemplified by Mohamed Bouazizi's suicide which catalyzed the Arab Spring.
CONTENTIOUS POLITICS (INTERSECTION OF ALL THREE SPHERES): Arises when collective action, public contention, and political claim-making converge directly against the state or its policies. High school student strikes, broader student mobilizations, and mass street demonstrations demanding structural governance reforms represent contentious politics.
Definitional Approaches and Their Methodological Implications
Scholarly debate around political participation is framed by competing definitions that illustrate the trade-offs between conceptual precision and empirical inclusivity:
Samuel Huntington and Joan Nelson (1976) formulate an influential narrow definition, characterizing political participation as direct activity by private citizens designed to influence government decision-making. While analytically rigorous, this definition faces significant empirical limitations. First, it restricts participation exclusively to actions directed at the state apparatus, neglecting activities aimed at transforming social norms, corporate practices, or cultural institutions. Second, its insistence on direct action excludes subtle, indirect, and lifestyle-based mechanisms through which social actors shift political reality.
Sidney Verba, Kay Lehman Schlozman, and Henry Brady expand this framework by defining participation as any activity that has the intent or effect of influencing government action, either directly by affecting the formulation and implementation of public policy, or indirectly by influencing the selection of the political personnel who determine those policies. While this formulation broadens the scope to encompass indirect channels of influence, it remains tethered to a state-centric paradigm where the ultimate target must be policy output or electoral outcomes.
At the opposite conceptual pole, Sherry Arnstein (1969) advances an expansive definition, identifying political participation as a categorical term for citizen power. In Arnstein's framework, any exercise or assertion of citizen agency—including reading newspapers, civic dialogue, and community deliberation—is classified as participation. The principal vulnerability of this formulation is hyper-politicization: by defining all deployments of civic power as political, the concept risks losing operational utility, echoing radical sociological arguments where every microscopic power negotiation in everyday life becomes inherently political.
The Non-Participation Paradox and Covert Political Signaling
A critical structural limitation shared by traditional definitions is their exclusive focus on affirmative action, which overlooks politically motivated non-participation. Deliberate non-participation—such as strategic electoral abstention or boycotting public assemblies—often constitutes a conscious, highly politicized act. In competitive authoritarian regimes, refusing to cast a ballot serves as an explicit rejection of electoral legitimacy and regime manipulation. In advanced liberal democracies, citizens frequently abstain from elections to register profound ideological alienation, protest undifferentiated party platforms, or challenge the representative system itself. Disentangling politically motivated abstention from passive apathy remains a profound methodological hurdle. A forthcoming empirical investigation by Italian political scientists underscores that while significant shares of non-voters abstain due to substantive political convictions, standard survey methodologies struggle to separate this cohort from voters disengaged due to logistical barriers or political indifference.
A parallel challenge to standard definitions emerges from ideological groups that deliberately avoid explicit political framing. Contemporary subcultures, such as the "tradwife" (traditional wife) movement or "incel" (involuntary celibate) networks, circulate intensely political worldviews regarding gender hierarchies, demographic decline, and state social policy while framing their content through lifestyle aesthetics, domesticity, personal grievances, or religious traditionalism. Given high levels of public disaffection from institutional politics across Western democracies, political and cultural entrepreneurs frequently mobilize citizens by cloaking ideological agendas in non-political, cultural rhetoric. Definitions restricted to direct, explicitly framed interactions with government fail to capture these covert mobilizations.
The methodological stakes of these conceptual debates are decisive. Scholars relying on narrow, conventional metrics inevitably diagnose a systemic crisis of democratic legitimacy, citing plummeting voter turnout, collapsing political party memberships, and eroding labor union densities. Conversely, researchers adopting expansive frameworks conclude that civic activism is dynamic and resilient, evidenced by the proliferation of decentralized collective action, widespread consumer buycotting, digital petitioning, and lifestyle politics.
The Classical Paradigm of Political Participation: Individual and Structural Determinants
The standard behavioral paradigm of political participation was forged during the 1960s and 1970s within the socio-psychological survey tradition of political science. Cross-national empirical analyses confirm that its foundational axioms remain broadly accurate across both consolidated and emerging democracies:
ASYMMETRY OF ELECTORAL TURNOUT: Voting in national elections constitutes the sole participatory mode that consistently engages a numerical majority of the citizenry in advanced liberal democracies. Even in polities characterized by depressed aggregate turnout, such as the United States, casting a ballot remains the most widespread form of political engagement.
MINORITY ENGAGEMENT IN CONVENTIONAL POLITICS: Highly demanding conventional acts—such as active electoral campaigning, party organizational work, contacting political representatives, and grassroots community organizing—remain the domain of a small minority of the population.
PROTEST MARGINALITY: Protest politics, including street demonstrations, civil petitions, and political strikes, is confined to a narrow slice of the electorate, historically ranging between and , and rarely exceeding of the population in contemporary democracies.
THE SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS (SES) MODEL: Structural resources exert a decisive influence over individual activism. Citizens possessing higher educational credentials, higher household income, and elevated occupational status participate at substantially higher rates across nearly all participatory modes. While historical gender gaps in participation have converged toward parity in consolidated democracies, disparities rooted in age, socioeconomic status, and ethnicity persist.
PSYCHOLOGICAL AND ATTITUDINAL FACILITATORS: Socioeconomic status correlates with internal political resources. Individuals exhibiting elevated levels of political interest, subjective political efficacy, subjective civic knowledge, and deep psychological investment in policy outcomes mobilize at higher rates. Furthermore, empirical research demonstrates that elevated politicization and intense political interest correlate positively with ideological polarization and extreme policy attitudes.
INTERMEDIARY MOBILIZING AGENCIES: Individual participatory propensities are mediated by institutional affiliations with mobilizing structures, including labor unions, political parties, religious congregations, and civic associations. Although traditional workplace and religious mobilization has eroded since the late twentieth century, mobilizing agencies persist through transformed conduits, such as digital networks and social media communication infrastructures.
Institutional and Macro-Level Drivers of Voter Turnout
Participatory behavior cannot be reduced entirely to micro-level individual motivations and socioeconomic endowments; macro-level political institutions systematically incentivize or depress citizen mobilization. G. Bingham Powell establishes that national institutional configurations account for immense cross-national variations in voter turnout. The presence of compulsory voting statutes, automatic state-managed voter registration procedures, and robust party-group alignments systematically elevate aggregate electoral participation. Conversely, turnout is depressed in one-party predominant systems and regimes where executive alternation is structurally restricted.
Party-group alignment denotes the structural and sociological integration binding political parties to distinct social cleavages and civil society institutions, such as organized labor or religious confessions. In polities across Continental and Northern Europe, historic parties developed as the direct electoral arms of defined social blocs—exemplified by the alignment between Social Democratic parties and trade union federations, or Christian Democratic parties and Catholic associational networks. Under conditions of strong alignment, parties act as organizational homes that aggregate collective interests and facilitate inter-group negotiation, producing high voter turnout. In contrast, in political systems with weak party-group alignment, such as the United States, parties operate as loose, shifting elite coalitions with weak social anchoring, dampening baseline electoral participation.
Comparative institutional research identifies several macro-level variables governing voter turnout:
ELECTORAL PROPORTIONALITY: Robert Jackman and Ross Miller demonstrate that proportional representation (PR) systems generate higher voter turnout than majoritarian single-member district systems. Under proportional rules, citizens recognize that minor parties retain a viable pathway to parliamentary representation, minimizing the incidence of "wasted votes" and preserving incentives for political mobilization.
MACRO-STRUCTURAL DETERMINANTS: Systematic evaluations by André Blais and collaborators identify several institutional and contextual predictors of turnout:
Voting Age and Registration Requirements: Structural barriers to the franchise, such as voluntary, citizen-initiated voter registration, suppress participation.
Competitiveness and Closeness: Turnout increases in direct proportion to the competitiveness and anticipated closeness of the electoral outcome.
Fractionalization: The number of competing parties shapes mobilization incentives; modest multi-party competition enhances ideological choice, whereas extreme fragmentation can induce cognitive fatigue.
Economic Development and Demography: Wealthier nations display higher aggregate turnout. Furthermore, geographically and demographically smaller states regularly register higher participatory rates than expansive nations.
Electoral Frequency: The proliferation of frequent elections across local, regional, national, and supranational tiers depresses aggregate turnout by inducing severe voter fatigue.
The Transformation of Citizenship: Allegiant versus Assertive Citizens
Over the past seventy years, aggregate voter turnout across national elections has steadily declined across consolidated Western democracies, experiencing marked acceleration following the 1980s. A parallel secular decline has hollowed out political party memberships, with aggregate member-to-electorate ratios falling across advanced economies. Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone thesis diagnosed this withdrawal as symptomatic of an all-encompassing collapse of civic engagement and social capital. Putnam observed that citizens were disengaging from community life across the board—withdrawing from church attendance, labor organizations, civic clubs, and recreational bowling leagues—which relegated political apathy to one symptom of societal atomization.
However, contemporary empirical analysis refines Putnam's thesis. While traditional community associations have declined, political engagement itself has undergone a structural transformation rather than an absolute contraction. Grounded in Russell Dalton's framework, advanced industrial democracies have witnessed the erosion of the traditional "citizen duty" ideal and the concurrent ascent of the "engaged citizen." These archetypes represent two distinct normative orientations toward political life:
ALLEGIANT CITIZENS (CITIZEN DUTY MODEL): Predominantly concentrated within older demographic cohorts, allegiant citizens embrace a deferential orientation toward established authority across familial, workplace, educational, and political hierarchies. Their value priorities focus on output legitimacy, placing paramount emphasis on law, order, domestic security, and protective materialist stability over participatory inputs. They maintain high institutional trust in established representative bodies. Allegiant citizens fully endorse democratic principles while remaining uncritical supporters of representative democracy in practice, conceptualizing governance as a mechanism for the delivery of public collective goods. Their activism is focused on legitimacy-granting, conventional behaviors—primarily regular voting, institutional party membership, and direct communication with elected representatives.
ASSERTIVE CITIZENS (ENGAGED CITIZEN MODEL): Concentrated among younger cohorts, assertive citizens display marked autonomy from traditional authority structures. They maintain an egalitarian skepticism toward hierarchy within society, the workplace, and higher education. Their value priorities emphasize input legitimacy, demanding direct participatory voice, institutional consultation, and post-materialist emancipative freedoms over materialist security. Assertive citizens harbor profound skepticism toward traditional political institutions, resulting in depressed institutional trust. Although deeply committed to abstract democratic principles, they display marked dissatisfaction with the contemporary practice of representative governance. These "dissatisfied democrats" criticize representative democracy not from an anti-democratic impulse, but from a demand for more exacting, participatory, and consultative governance. Consequently, their participatory repertoire emphasizes non-institutionalized, elite-challenging actions, including street demonstrations, unauthorized direct actions, economic boycotts, buycotts, and transnational digital mobilization.
Cohort Replacement versus Life-Cycle Effects across Two-Dimensional Political Space
To map how political orientations evolve across generations, political science evaluates citizen preferences along two orthogonal axes of competition:
THE HORIZONTAL (ECONOMIC) AXIS: Captures state intervention versus market allocation, or classical left-versus-right redistributive preferences. Empirical research shows that citizen movement along this horizontal axis is cyclical rather than generational. Public sentiment regularly fluctuates in response to the ideological orientation of the governing executive. For instance, in France, four to five years under a right-wing administration (such as Nicolas Sarkozy) regularly induces an aggregate electorate shift toward left-leaning demands for state intervention (as observed preceding the election of François Hollande in 2012, mirroring earlier shifts before François Mitterrand). Following sustained periods of left-wing governance, public preferences swing back toward market liberalization.
THE VERTICAL (CULTURAL) AXIS: Measures cultural, social, and authority dimensions, opposing authoritarian, socially conservative orientations to libertarian, progressive values. Unlike economic attitudes, movement along this cultural axis is propelled by generational cohort replacement rather than individual life-cycle aging.
Extensive panel studies spanning upwards of forty years and cross-national surveys across more than thirty democracies confirm that citizens do not organically drift toward cultural conservatism as they grow older. Apparent generational divides are driven by cohort socialization: every successive demographic cohort is socialized under distinct socio-historical, economic, and technological conditions, emerging more culturally progressive than the generation that preceded it. While a relative left-right distribution exists within every single cohort, the normative baseline of the cultural axis shifts continuously toward progressive values.
This dynamic of cohort replacement is clearly illustrated by the collapse of biological racism. During the immediate post-World War II period, overt belief in the inherent biological inequality and hierarchical superiority of specific races was widespread among conservative populations in advanced Western democracies, polling near within representative samples. Over subsequent decades, biological racism was thoroughly discredited, with contemporary surveys of populations aged and under indicating endorsement levels near . While systemic racial prejudice persists, its conceptual formulation and public expression have shifted away from genetic determinism. A similar generational transformation characterizes social attitudes toward homosexuality and same-sex unions: configurations that were condemned by majorities in the 1950s are viewed as standard, legitimate expressions of civic equality among contemporary younger cohorts.
The Electoral Weight of Generations, Political Efficacy, and Gerontocracy
The coexistence of allegiant and assertive citizenries produces an acute political imbalance. Although younger cohorts are progressively assertive and report high subjective interest in politics, their real-world political influence is suppressed by demographic trends and participatory self-exclusion:
DEMOGRAPHIC ASYMMETRY: The post-World War II baby boomer cohort is substantially larger than each successive generational cohort (including Generation X, Millennials, and Generation Z). Due to post-war fertility declines and population aging across advanced industrial democracies, older voters command a vast demographic advantage within the total electorate.
THE ELECTORAL PARTICIPATION GAP: Because older cohorts were socialized into the allegiant "citizen duty" model, they turn out to vote at exceptionally high rates, treating electoral participation as a non-negotiable moral obligation. Conversely, younger generations socialized into the assertive paradigm perceive institutional ballot casting as insufficient, demanding more unmediated, consultative forms of political action. Consequently, voter turnout among younger cohorts has fallen, with Millennials and Gen Z voting at rates lower than previous cohorts when they were the exact same age.
THE CIVIC DUTY PARADOX AND INTERNAL EFFICACY: Survey evidence indicates that older cohorts cast ballots even when they perceive their personal vote to lack external political efficacy; they mobilize because voting is conceptualized as an essential civic obligation. Younger citizens, by contrast, link the decision to vote to their evaluation of efficacy. Because substantial majorities of youth harbor deep cynicism regarding the responsiveness of representative institutions and doubt that voting makes a measurable difference, they disproportionately withdraw from the electoral arena.
THE EMERGENCE OF FUNCTIONAL GERONTOCRACY: The convergence of demographic weight and elevated electoral turnout allows older generations to exercise outsized influence over public policy and state expenditure. This structural dynamic produces a functional gerontocracy. As detailed in the scholarship of Oxford professor Tim Vlandas regarding "Gerontonomy," political parties structurally align their policy platforms to court the material interests (such as pensions and healthcare) and cultural values (such as order, authority, and nostalgia) of reliable older voters. By voluntarily abstaining from voting, younger cohorts inadvertently surrender democratic leverage to older electorates, entrenching policy priorities that overlook youth interests.
Data mapping participatory repertoires in France underscores this generational divide: older generations born in the 1940s and 1950s operate as institutional "poly-participants," pairing regular voting with party membership and official correspondence. Younger generations exhibit falling voting rates alongside rising participation in non-institutional direct actions, street mobilization, and consumer boycotts. Yet because voting retains unmatched systemic legitimacy in conferring legal authority, non-voting assertive cohorts remain structurally marginalized in institutional policy-making.
Questions & Discussion
QUESTION: Can non-human elements, such as algorithmic architectures or artificial intelligence on digital platforms, be classified as political actors?
RESPONSE: While standard political science restricts actor status to human entities with deliberate consciousness, algorithmic systems (such as those operating Twitter/X, TikTok, or meta-platforms) function undeniably as political agents. Even if an analyst rejects the radical constructivist argument that inanimate technical infrastructures possess political agency, these algorithmic systems act as structural vectors shaping political debate, distributing informational content, and mediating political participation.
QUESTION: Does the observed engagement of older citizens with conventional political institutions simply reflect increased leisure time resulting from retirement, rather than an underlying cohort or citizenship difference?
RESPONSE: Empirical cohort analyses refute the leisure-time hypothesis. By comparing cohorts born in the 1940s against those born in the 1960s at identical stages of the life cycle (such as their early seventies when both groups were fully retired), researchers find that the inter-cohort differences in political attitudes and repertoires persist. If retirement leisure were the primary driver, disparate cohorts would converge in their participatory behaviors upon leaving the workforce. The persistent variance demonstrates that these behaviors reflect generational socialization rather than free time.
QUESTION: What structural socio-historical conditions explain why different generations internalize distinct citizenship ideals and divergent levels of institutional trust?
RESPONSE: Every generational cohort undergoes formative political socialization under distinct historical conditions. For example, individuals socialized immediately following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 came of age during the "end of history" era, dominated by a consensus between moderate center-left social democrats and center-right Christian democrats who viewed globalization, open markets, and technical deregulation as settled economic instruments. In contrast, older cohorts socialized during the mid-twentieth century observed the Watergate scandal as a rare anomaly within a healthy institutional architecture. Contemporary youth have been socialized during decades marked by financial crashes, austerity, systemic crises, and low baseline trust in institutional integrity, leading them to view public scandals as symptomatic of broken representative systems.
QUESTION: Are consolidated Western democracies currently operating as functional gerontocracies dominated by elderly voters?
RESPONSE: Consolidated Western democracies conform to the definition of functional gerontocracies. The material weight of expanding retiree populations, paired with their consistently high voter turnout, forces political parties to prioritize their welfare and security demands. Tim Vlandas's research on "Gerontonomy" documents this structural shift toward the economic interests of older demographics, which is compounded by the electoral self-marginalization of youth.
QUESTION: Would instituting mandatory compulsory voting rectify the generational turnout imbalance and restore representational parity?
RESPONSE: Institutional data suggest compulsory voting is not an absolute remedy. In jurisdictions with mandatory voting statutes, turnout typically plateaus around , leaving an underlying margin where inter-cohort disparities in voluntary mobilization persist. Furthermore, compelling participation introduces normative tensions in democratic theory regarding whether the fundamental liberty of the citizen includes the right to consciously withhold political consent through abstention.