Introduction
Political participation is broadly evoked to characterise various forms of peopleās engagement with political issues, influencing the processes of who gets what, when, and how, to borrow Harold Lasswellās (1936) seminal definition of politics. Admittedly, the wide range of human action with the potential to affect political processes is difficult to quantify, measure, and assess, particularly when research is positioned on a global scale, as the notion can include variables from electoral behaviour to protest politics and economic boycotts of consumer products. This ambivalence is often reflected in the relevant literature on the study of political participation, with contributions differing significantly with regard to what they conceptually and empirically perceive as instances of political engagement. Some scholars seek to broaden the definitions of political participation to capture an expanding repertoire of human behaviour signifying political agency (Theocharis & van Deth 2018). Others insist that efforts to focus on the variety of actions in the face of expanding opportunities for agency overlook the political struggles of those living on the margins of democracy or outright authoritarian states, where instances of participatory action can nevertheless be observed although peopleās freedoms are severely curtailed (Fukui et al. 2000; Lust-Okar & Zerhouni 2008). This book aligns with the latter approach, arguing in favour of broadening the study of political participation to account for the vibrant and pluralistic nature of political agency, even when exercised within repressive conditions and coercive institutional configurations. Failure to account for political engagement in societies with deficient democratic structures not only neglects important instances of individual and collective action that may resonate in the political arena but also risks distancing the concept itself from its empirical application worldwide.
This chapter summarises the relevant literature on political participation, paying attention to the applicability of various research paradigms to examining agency in non-democratic contexts. The first section distinguishes broadly among three major scholarly traditions of viewing political participation, namely liberal, developmental, and sociocultural approaches. Although the conceptual boundaries present in these traditions often overlap, each approach is critically discussed in terms of its theoretical assumptions and research focus, groups or actors it tends to focus on as political agents, and specific participatory avenues and mechanisms it deems important for channelling political participation. The final section of the chapter synthesises key issues and problems identified in these traditions and argues for a rapprochement among disciplines to understand the myriad of ways in which political participation finds expression under conditions of limited political freedom. It concludes by pointing toward the need for a framework of political participation centring on people and society (further developed in Chapter 2) in order to appreciate not just diverse contexts of pluralistic expressions of political agency in general but also instances of citizen engagement in particularly authoritarian states.
Liberal tradition
Historically, research on political participation has been related to the rise of scholarly interest in democratic politics and motivated by the plight to improve the quality of democratic decision-making. Originating in the early 20th century as a response to criticisms of democratic practices primarily in Western industrialised democracies, scholars sought to study peopleās involvement in the political processes and explore ways to strengthen peopleās voice in the political space (Scaff 1975). Democratic regimes are understood as the rule by the people, so participation inevitably assumes an important role in democratic theory. These insights are premised on the idea that citizen engagement is the key to legitimising power and posits that specific procedural aspects of the regime (primarily located within formal institutions associated with electoral politics) embody participation in most substantial ways. The presence and quality of institutional channels designed for participatory ends, in turn, serve as a defining feature of democratic rule (Dahl 1971; Lipset 1959, p. 71; Sartori 1965, p. 66; Schumpeter 1950, p. 84), providing ground to the observation that ā[a]ny book about political participation is also a book about democracyā (Parry et al. 1992, p. 1). We broadly associate these lines of reasoning with the liberal tradition.
Liberal approaches towards political participation are disproportionately embedded in the tradition of representative democracy, where decision-making is performed through fair procedures that aggregate peopleās preferences into collectively binding decisions and mediate ways in which individuals participate. While decisions are made by the elites, ordinary citizens primarily contribute by periodically engaging through formal participatory institutions that are instrumental in arbitrating among competitive interests and protecting society from the possibility that elected elites would abuse their power. Democratic structures therefore require active citizen engagement as their electoral behaviour, and choices to join political parties or align themselves with civil society organisations are seen as ways to communicate their interests to those in power. The institutional context is, in turn, responsible for ensuring fair outcomes of the political system, in channelling individual preferences into collectively binding rules while remaining receptive to a variety of other communication mechanisms to ensure fairness of the rule. The role of citizen participation is only elevated under the assumption that unresponsive, corrupt, and unpopular officials will be ousted from power through the very same participatory institutions that provide checks and balances to their power. As a result, the liberal tradition is often accompanied by the assumption that the extent to which people exercise their political agency is closely related to the amounts of political freedom and civil liberties they enjoy.
Citizens as political participants
Liberal inquiries tend to be based on the premise that people with access to participatory institutions are inherently equipped with political agency and the capacity to make demands towards the state. In other words, access to these institutions itself enables political agency. While political elites are tasked with making decisions and conducting politics, the core of analysis typically revolves around the citizens as they choose, influence, and communicate with the authorities. Peopleās ability to affect the selection of government personnel and their actions comprise the definitional core of political participation within the liberal tradition (Verba & Nie 1972).
Scholars within this tradition tend to assume individual participants to be rational agents, whose intentions, interests, preferences, attitudes, values, and objectives are reflected in their behaviour (Olson 1971). Others emphasise that modes of participation as well as institutions themselves are shaped by the political culture embedded in the historical and socio-economic contingencies of any nation that informs citizen attitudes and political behaviour (Verba et al. 1995). Either way, liberal approaches tend to advance from the requirement that citizens possess an opportunity to participate and proceed to analyse participatory trends. While they may diverge in their assumptions about whether rational considerations or cultural attitudes inform citizensā political choices, they agree in viewing political participation in terms of its communicative value and its task of selecting (or removing) political elites. Even if liberal scholars recognise that variables besides the mere ability to participate play a role in whether or not people exercise their political agency, participation is nevertheless typically associated with the legally prescribed mechanisms for engagement within largely democratic contexts.
Formal and directly political mechanisms for participation
Early scholarship on participation largely equated the notion to aggregate voting behaviour with electoral institutions. Later contributions included socio-economic explanations for why people participate, emphasising that oneās wealth, ethnicity, gender, or social status may shape participatory outcomes of different groups and made increasing use of survey data to supplement voting patterns in investigating peopleās political attitudes (Asher et al. 1984; Salisbury 1975). In this way, liberal scholars tended to investigate causality between socio-economic variables and electoral behaviour, proposing that outcomes may be corrected by improving the fairness and efficiency of formal institutions (Zittel & Fuchs 2007). Values pertaining to participation and their formation were meanwhile overlooked, disregarding reasons for why individuals become politicised or assume political agency to begin with.
Instead, the focus of liberal scholarship emphasises the role of what is often referred to as traditional or conventional modes of participation to identify directly political behaviour of individual agents. Voting turnout, party membership or donations, and institutionalised participation in unions are typically associated with variables that encompass the outcomes of political participation. Gradually the approach has been expanded also towards āinformalā participatory action (Brannan et al. 2007), understood as extra-electoral, but nevertheless often formally institutionalised engagement in the civil society, voluntary or religious organisations, and interest group activities. For liberal scholars, the value of such āinformalā mechanisms rests within their capacity to provide social resources that help mobilise political action in the formal realm (Verba et al. 1995), their function of communicating peopleās preferences to political elites or influencing public policy, and providing checks to the political system (Theocharis & van Deth 2018) rather than conceptualised independently as āinformalā exhibitions of autonomous political agency.
The liberal tradition has not only pioneered research on political participation but also greatly contributed to understanding factors that encourage or curtail citizen involvement, especially within Western democratic political contexts, where electoral channels are the dominant mechanisms for channelling citizensā political voice. Although these factors are highly related to political freedoms, civil rights, and the ideals of representative democratic theory in general, their empirical application continues to rely heavily on the experiences in democratic political contexts that supply the citizenry with the necessary institutionalised channels for formal participation. In the process, these studies have often sacrificed attention to conceptual nuances in favour of valid indicators available for measurement and cross-country comparisons, binding the concept of political participation with democratic theory and limiting it to explicitly āpoliticalā participation primarily within formal institutions.
Changing patterns of participation
Understandably, focusing on the instrumental and communicative role of electoral channels for participation is problematic when extended to countries with deficient democratic institutions. The natural impulse of liberal scholarship tends to disregard participation in authoritarian states in its own right, focusing instead on ways in which formal institutions are inadequate and how autocrats use elections, parties, and legislatures to control participation and shape constituencies (Gandhi & Przeworski 2007; Geddes et al. 2014). Some authors have suggested, however, that participation in autocracies can be found outside of electoral channels. For instance, John Keaneās (2018) insights regarding the Peopleās Republic of China suggest locally made democratic governance practices on a municipal level, while other scholars draw attention to instances of participation emerging from cooperative grassroots and self-government entities widespread among the Chinese rural population taking place on the policy implementation rather than decision-making stage (Jennings 1997; Zhong 2004). Similar cases of solving collective problems through informally organised institutions that resemble local governments have historically also been widespread throughout the Middle East (Alhamad 2008, pp. 40ā42), suggesting that participation lies beyond the officially designated channels.
The limitations of liberal approaches are further illuminated by studies observing an increase of elections worldwide (Diamond & Gunther 2001), paradoxically indicating at least the presence of, if not a rise in, political participation in various countries across the world. Yet, many states with electoral institutions today are not democratic but are rather referred to as hybrid regimes or electoral and competitive autocracies (Diamond 2002; Levitsky & Way 2010). Scholars have shown that increased levels of traditional forms of participation do not necessarily imply increased contestation of political power (Jayasuriya & Rodan 2007; Rodan 2018), allowing states to remain authoritarian even after adopting democratic institutions. Observing instances beyond aggregate numbers of electoral turnout and traditional forms of explicitly political participation may be crucial for understanding the general context in which citizen engagement takes place together with opportunities and obstacles these contexts present to individuals for making political change.
Focusing on conventional modes of participation may also prompt scholars to draw erroneous insights about the state of the art of political engagement in democratic countries specifically. Over the past decades, advanced industrial democracies have experienced a seeming decline in voter turnouts, reflecting a growing distrust in the electoral system and democratic institutions in general (Diamond & Gunther 2001; Norris 2002; Pharr & Putnam 2000). For liberal approaches these observations represent a state of crisis in democratic politics, necessitating efforts to improve the legitimacy of institutions and foster or āengineerā political participation (Brannan et al. 2007; Zittel & Fuchs 2007). While the decline of participation through conventional mechanisms may well be a source for concern, an explicit focus on electoral participation may obscure the rise of other unconventional forms of participatory action. In her worldwide analysis, Pippa Norris (2002) notes that while the rate of traditional means of participation has indeed declined, these trends are not explained by a global rise in political apathy but rather by outcomes of socio-economic modernisation and human development, which have changed the nature of civic action. Consequently, Norris argues, political activism has not been eroded but rather reinvented, replaced by new modes of participation (Skocpol & Fiorina 1999; Skocpol 2003), represented by new agencies, repertoires, and targets that participants seek to influence (Norris 2002, pp. 215ā216). Examining merely āconventionalā mechanisms is inadequate for capturing such reinvented practices through innovative, extra-electoral channels.
Similarly, Bennett (1998, 2012) argues that politics has become more person-alised, and individual expressions of political agency that are formulated through personal lifestyle values rather than collective action frames are replacing participation in electoral institutions. Often such actions are coordinated in and enabled by the digital space (Theocharis & van Deth 2018), allowing people to engage with political issues on a daily basis, regarding ec...
