Generations, Political Participation and Social Change in Western Europe

Maria Grasso

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138488175
• eBook ISBN: 9781317407959
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This new comparative analysis shows that there are reasons to be concerned about the future of democratic politics. Younger generations have become disengaged from the political process. The evidence presented in this comprehensive study shows that they are not just less likely than older generations to engage in institutional political activism such as voting and party membership - they are also less likely to engage in extra-institutional protest activism.

Generations, Political Participation and Social Change in Western Europe offers a rigorously researched empirical analysis of political participation trends across generations in Western Europe. It examines the way in which the political behaviour of younger generations leads to social change. Are younger generations completely disengaged from politics, or do they simply choose to participate in a different way to previous generations?

The book is of key interest to scholars, students and practitioners of political sociology, political participation and behaviour, European Politics, Comparative Politics and Sociology.

1
Introduction

This book is about democracy. It is about the way in which Western European citizens’ popular political engagement has evolved since the end of the 1970s to the onset of the 2008 financial crisis. The key conclusions of the book point to a slow but steady decline of democratic politics. A central argument of this book is that we have witnessed the hollowing out of democracy over the last few decades. In particular, this is expressed in the decline of political participation and popular involvement in political activism. The book presents empirical evidence to show how democratic publics have increasingly become alienated from their own political systems and both institutional and extra-institutional means to influence the organisation of our societies. At the end of the twenty-first century, Western publics have become the objects, rather than the subjects, of history.

This new comparative analysis shows how the decline of political involvement in Western Europe occurs through generational change. Social change comes about as older generations die out and are replaced by younger generations exhibiting new patterns of behaviour. Increasingly, the democratic representative mechanisms in advanced democracies are breaking down since citizens – and younger ones in particular – no longer see politics as a means to change the world for the better. Rather, they see politicians as distant and selfish, careerists trapped – in the words of Pitkin (2004), “inside the beltway” not just physically, but also mentally. More and more citizens reject politics by not voting. This is most dramatically seen in the decline of youth voter turnout, not just in Britain, but across advanced democracies. For some, the decline of what is termed ‘conventional’ political participation – voting, engaging with politics parties and other traditional institutions of politics – is offset to some extent at least by protest activism and new social movements that have become more widespread since the 1960s. Evidence presented in this book however suggests that the observed rise in protest activism is no panacea for our hollowed out democracies. First, participation in protest activities and new social movements, while useful for democratic dialogue, cannot replace engagement with a functioning representative democratic system. Second, evidence presented in this book suggests that just like with conventional participation, unconventional engagement and protest activism will also commence to decline in the future as the politically active 1960s–1970s generation of baby-boomers begins to age and comes to be replaced in the population by the more politically passive younger generations coming of age in the 1980s and 1990s.

In the future, the only hope to revitalise our democracies lies with the emergence of a newly politicised generation of young people developing progressive answers for contemporary problems. Only time will tell if the current financial crisis and the steep toll it is exerting, including deepening inequality across the globe, is sowing the conditions for the development of a new politicised younger generation that can inject fresh life into democratic politics. It has been said that social change “cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future” (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Karl Marx 1852). This book provides an analysis of how the political participation patterns of Western European democracies have evolved since the end of the 1970s to the onset of the 2008 financial crisis in order to contribute to our understanding of the forces that have shaped the present.

Data and methods

In order to investigate the state of popular political involvement and the health of democratic society in Western Europe, this book draws on analyses of data from established cross-national surveys. For the most part, we focus on the period 1981–2006 – from the great transformations of the age of affluence and the emergence of ‘new social movements’ to just before the start of the financial crisis. This time frame allows us to assess the extent of changes in the political participation patterns of Western European democracies as predicted by prominent theories of social change. Excluding the most recent years allows us first to focus on specific explanations without including confounding factors; second, this is necessary in order to analyse generational change since we need to examine periods that allow for the youngest generations to have ‘come of age’. We rely in particular on the well-established cross-national surveys of the European Values Study (EVS) and the European Social Survey (ESS). Both provide high quality data on the participation patterns of European publics over time.

While the results of this investigation are widely generalisable to advanced industrial societies, we focus on ten Western European countries in particular in order to allow a manageable amount of variation for developing explanatory narratives. These ten Western European democracies that this study will focus on are Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany (West), Great Britain, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden. They are all established European democracies that have roughly similar political systems and historical trajectories; most importantly, they can be understood to have similar political generations (Van Deth and Elff 2000). Importantly, analysing empirical survey data on political participation allows for the examination of the extent to which ‘conventional’, or elite-directed, formal, institutional, political participation, associated with traditional institutions such as political parties and trade unions, is in decline. At the same time, it also allows for examining the question of the extent to which ‘unconventional’, or elite-challenging, informal, extra-institutional, political participation related to new social movements (NSMs) and protest is on the rise.

In order to understand the processes of social change underpinning declining popular political involvement in Western Europe, we examine the extent to which these changes are driven by the replacement of older with younger generations in the population. Since social change comes about through intergenerational replacement, it is often argued that the above patterns should be most prominent amongst the youngest generations (Grasso 2013a). In other words, that the youngest generation is the least likely to participate in conventional political activities, while at the same time being the most likely to engage in unconventional political activities, including getting involved in new social movements (Grasso and Giugni 2013, Grasso and Giugni 2015, Giugni and Grasso 2015, Grasso and Giugni 2016). In the course of this book, we will conduct analyses of survey data and examine evidence to determine whether this is indeed the case when we look at the landscape of political participation in Western Europe.

The results presented in this book show that the patterns of political participation across Western Europe are remarkably varied, partly owing to diverse histories and political cultures. The book also presents evidence that it is not the case that younger generations are completely detached from conventional politics, parties and trade unions. We also show that it is also not the case that all older generations are less engaged in protest and other types of unconventional activism than the youngest cohorts. One of the key conclusions of this study is to show that the generation socialised in the tumultuous political period of the late 1960s and 1970s are the most active in protest activism. They are still ‘the protest generation’ (Grasso 2011). The results presented in this study provide clear evidence that the divergent formative experiences of the five political generations identified in diverse and specific historical and political contexts matter, and that they differentiate generations in their patterns of participation many years later (Grasso 2013b). This finding in particular has important implications for the future of our democracies and we elaborate on these wider conclusions in the final chapter.

Since political participation is a complex, multi-dimensional concept, its patterns exhibit substantial cross-national and over-time variation (Pattie et al. 2004). This means it should be both understood and measured across a spectrum of different activities (Grasso 2016) and for each country in turn, at least for the starting analyses. For this reason, for most of the book, country-by-country analyses are conducted. We are interested in examining the extent to which declining political involvement is a process common to Western European democracies or rather whether there are important cross-national differences. We are also interested in examining whether patterns are similar for indicators grouped into the same conventional/unconventional theoretical categories. As such we do not collapse indicators into scales, but rather examine them each on their own terms to more clearly see over time and generational patterns.

In order to convincingly argue that the observed differences in participation between older and younger generations will lead to social change through intergenerational replacement, we must show that these are indeed ‘generational’ differences due to divergent socialisation experiences and not simply ‘age’ differences related to the different life-stages that respondents are in at the time of their observation. Moreover, we need to isolate ‘period effects’ relating to the historical moment of observation. For example, we know that younger people tend to be more likely to attend demonstrations and that older people are generally more likely to vote and to become party members (Grasso 2011, Grasso 2014). Moreover, these activities have been more or less popular in different time periods. A detailed account of the data and methods underpinning this study is provided in the Appendix, but here we just note that care has been taken in the empirical analysis underlying this research to develop statistical methods and models to disentangle age, generational and period, or time, effects in order to isolate ‘pure’ socialisation differences that are likely to support processes of social change through intergenerational replacement.

Participation and democracy

Why does political participation matter? Political participation is at the heart of democratic practice. The way in which scholars conceptualise its relation to democracy and the implications they draw from the patterns they observe, reveal their preferences for different types of democratic government. For some, all that matters is for a minimum number of people to vote to legitimise governments (Schumpeter 1952), whilst for others, democracy is unthinkable without parties (Schattschneider 1942). Yet more consider ‘cyber-activism’ (Pickerell 2003) and e-petitions just as worthwhile, since all that is important is that people are somehow ‘engaged’ with the processes of government.

For popular theorists of democracy, participation is important because it is the dominant method for developing and critically examining political ideas, as well as providing the demos with a means to keep government to account (Barber 1984; Habermas 1975; Mill 1861). Radical democrats take this a step further in arguing that “social objectivity is ultimately political” and in fact “constituted through acts of power” (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 6). On this reading, political participation is necessary for democracy since it is only through political struggle that society creates meaning and decides how it should be organised (Furedi 2005; Mouffe 2000). Political practice itself, on this reading, is understood as constituting social identities; the “ineradicability of antagonism” in democracy implies that the absence of participation simply preserves the power relations that are already in place (Mouffe 2000: 13).

On the other side of the spectrum, elite competition theorists, while also granting that political participation is necessary for democracy, see it, mostly in the form of voting, as primarily a means for legitimising elite decision-making (Almond and Verba 1963; Berelson et al. 1954; Rosema 2006; Schumpeter 1952). The important difference between elite competition theorists and those who defend a more participatory approach concerns whether mass political involvement is either desirable or a realistic expectation. Theorists of participatory democracy argue that the more vibrant and engaged the polity, the more dynamic and truly democratic society will be. On the other side of the debate, elite competition theorists are more pessimistic about people, considering them in the main ignorant, emotional and prone to ‘crowd mentality’. These theorists fear mass participation for its potential to be radically destabilising. In other words: some participation is important for legitimising democratic systems, but in general it is best left to the experts.

While different theories of democracy may disagree on the extent to which participation is desirable and the centrality of the function it is meant to fulfil in modern democracies, they all invariably agree that at least some degree of participation is essential for functioning democratic government.

How scholars conceptualise participation and the meaning they attach to different activities carries implications for the conclusions they draw concerning the importance of declining popular political participation in Western democracies. For Mair (2006), following Schattschneider’s (1942) classical account, democracy is unthinkable without parties. Hence, the steep decline in party membership is concerning since it is a symptom of the demise of representative, accountable democratic government. Contrary to Mair (2006), others understand the demise of traditional parties in less pessimistic terms. For Norris (2002), it is less concerning that traditional agencies have become less popular, since activism has been ‘reinvented’ through the rise of alternative avenues; participation has simply evolved from the ‘politics of loyalties’ to the ‘politics of choice’.

Whilst the elite competition argument has been criticised for being too pessimistic about the citizenry, the emphasis on the progressive potential of any kind of participatory democracy has also been problematised. Authors such as Mair (2006) emphasise the changing role of political parties as they become more managerial to suggest that the current political context is in many respects different from those of the past and that other types of participation, namely unconventional ones, cannot substitute parties in representative political systems. This brings the social significance of the various forms of political participation into focus, which is in turn fundamental to understanding the dynamic potential of participation, since it occurs within specific social contexts. Individuals are situated in society and in distinct socio-historical contexts and react to what is out there; they do not act in a vacuum. Without taking stock of this, the participatory citizenship argument runs the risk of equating participation per se with the heart and soul of democracy. This would be an overly reductionist view: the ideals of both democracy and politics involve ideas, arguments, confrontation and the creation of specific kinds of meaning and broader orientations towards the organisation and future of society, not simply activi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Studying political participation in Western Europe
• 3 Generations and social change
• 4 The evolution of political participation in Western Europe
• 5 Generations and formal political participation in Western Europe
• 6 Generations and informal political participation in Western Europe
• 7 Explaining generational differences in political participation in Western Europe
• 8 The future of political participation in Western Europe
• Appendix: Analysing political participation and social change in Western Europe
• Index