Clarifying “Political Participation” by Considering Why We Care About It
by
Carole Jean Uhlaner
Department of Political Science
University of Cali8fornia, Irvine
Irvine, California 92617
cuhlaner@uci.edu
September 20, 2014
Very rough draft. Paper prepared for the PARTIREP Workshop “Conceptualizing Political
Participation”, Mannheim, September 25-26, 2014
Abstract: Van Deth (2014) has suggested a conceptual map of political participation which
introduces the very useful idea of multiple valid definitions. The map does not provide guidance
as to the circumstances under which one might be more useful than another. This paper makes
an attempt to address that question by noting that there are multiple reasons to study political
participation. The varying research agendas have implications for this choice, especially with
regard to the role of intentionality in the concept, the status of consumer behavior, and the
boundaries of the “political.” Related considerations also suggest some modifications to the Van
Deth conceptual map.
1
Clarifying “political participation” by considering why we care about it
Scholarly disputes over the definition of the concept “political participation” are at some
level unresolvable as different purposes for studying the phenomenon suggest alternative
definitions. Although the disagreement has intensified in recent years, empirical scholars have
long offered differing interpretations. Rather than attempting to find a single solution, we can
more fruitfully follow Van Deth’s suggestion that we accept multiple definitions, and his
conceptual map provides a reasonable start. There remains the question of which definition is
more appropriate in a given circumstance. One key point to consider is the research agenda.
Several of these have motivated the study of political participation. The first differences that
arise from them concern the role of the actor’s intentions in defining political participation.
However, even after taking these implications into account, under each agenda, political
participation can expand to encompass almost anything unless further criteria are applied. In
particular they leave unresolved the currently important dispute over whether consumer behavior
constitutes a form of political participation. Additional definitional criteria can be derived from
considering classic normative reasons for studying participation, notably concern with the
feasibility of self-government and the related, but distinct, concern with system stability.
Especially when combined with the more immediate research agendas, these suggest the utility
of keeping political participation conceptually distinct from civic or social participation.
Additional definitional challenges arise when we consider what constitutes political participation
in authoritarian regimes. Consistent with the spirit of these remarks, Van Deth’s conceptual map
offers the very useful possibility of accommodating multiple definitions, although I argue it
would benefit from some revisions.
2
Three main agendas tend to motivate empirical research on political participation. Much
of the research takes the individual as the starting point and focuses upon understanding who
participates and why they act. An alternative agenda places its emphasis upon understanding the
effects of participation upon the political system, for example how it alters who holds power and
what policies are pursued. A third agenda focuses upon the effects of participation upon the
individual. In this agenda, going back to Rousseau and developed in modern times by Carole
Pateman (1970), political participation matters because of its effect upon the individual’s
development. Participation increases efficacy and self-realization. The deliberative democracy
movement carries this approach further. These different reasons for studying participation most
obviously lead to variation in the weight placed upon an individual’s intentions in acting. With
the first agenda we might include actions that the person regards as political participation, even if
an outside observer would disagree, but may not require intention. With the third agenda
motivation is crucial. With the second agenda motivation matters far less; a protester swells the
numbers at a pro-democracy rally even if he joined the crowd because he wanted to hear the
band.
In order to understand the further implications of these research agendas, it is useful to
consider how the concept of political participation evolved from something taken by scholars as
clear to its current problematic condition. Early behavioral scholars had a straightforward
definition of mass political participation, equating it with electoral behavior. As the concept has
expanded past the electoral view, it has become less clear, and consequently the alternative
agendas have become more important. The early empiricists focused on elections in democratic
systems. Political participation began with voting and, when thought of more broadly, extended
to other forms of participation in electoral politics. This is a subset of Van Deth’s political
3
participation I. People participated in politics by voting and by influencing the votes of other
people through campaigning for a candidate. The focus tended to be on explaining why some
people were active and others not. But since the effects were clear, in that participation affected
election outcomes and who had power, the distinction between the first and second agendas had
little relevance. As a corollary, intention was not usually problematic as the actions were seen as
prima facie political even if the actor had no articulated political motive. To take one example,
Stein Rokkan’s pioneering work on participation focused on electoral participation (for example
Rokkan, 1962a, 1962b, 1970). Consider a second illustrative example from an influential work.
The American Voter (Campbell, Converse, Miller and Stokes, 1960) also focused on elections.
The authors’ discussion of “modes of political participation” begins by saying, “For most
Americans voting is the sole act of participation in politics.” (p. 90) They then continue their
catalogue of activities with the following: belonging to a political club or organization,
canvassing for a party, contributing campaign funds, going to a political meeting or rally, doing
any other work for a party or candidate (p. 91). Having established that few people do any of
these things, they mention political discussion and paying attention to the campaign in the media
as “informal” participation, but in context seem to conflate participation with engagement (pp9192). Even with their expansion into the “informal” sphere, the focus remained electoral. Some
scholars did study protest, but this formed part of the literature on revolution and violence and
was seen as a separate stream of research.
Note that ambiguity about how much action must take place for something to be
considered political participation began early and continues. As mentioned above, the American
Voter blurred the line between psychological engagement and participation in musings about
following a political campaign in the media. In an influential summary of the literature, Milbrath
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(1965) went much farther. He explicitly included political involvement and activities to support
the regime as participation, as does Conway much later (2000). For these scholars, even reading
about politics is political participation. The debate over whether engagement without outward
activity counts as participation still persists; consider the contemporary scholars who include
visiting a web page as a form of political participation.1 .
By the next decade, the concept of participation exploded past voting and related
election activities. Verba and his colleagues (1971, 1972, 1973) included as participation a host
of activities separate from elections. In fact they argued that the many different participation
activities, which varied from country to country, nonetheless consistently clustered into a handful
of overarching modes, and explicitly characterized several of these, contact and communal, as
“non electoral.” Voting and campaigning, the electoral modes, filled out the list. Although
usually the modes are positively correlated, meaning that a participant in one is more likely to
take part in others than a randomly selected person, many people nonetheless partake in one or
some to the exclusion of other forms of participation.2 In particular, substantial numbers of
people who avoided electoral politics did engage in nonpartisan participation, such as
involvement with community groups. They deliberately excluded protest from their study,
conceived as it was prior to the wave of protests in the late 1960s. Barnes, Kaase, and their
colleagues in the Political Action project (1979, Jennings et al. 1989) fully incorporated political
protest as political participation; in fact one of their objectives was to assess the relationship
between protest and conventional participation, and they found these to be complements instead
See for example the 2005 “Citizens, Involvment, and Democracy” survey, Center for Democracy and Civil
Society, Georgetown University.
2
Van Deth uses “mode” to refer to specific actions. Retaining the concept of mode as a related collection of actions
can be very useful. For one reason, it deals well with the problem that two actions which appear nominally
equivalent may function quite differently in different states and even be political in one and nonpolitical in another.
One might even take a boldly empirical approach and identify new actions as political participation or not by
whether or not they fall into a mode with acts that clearly are so defined.
1
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of substitutes. They so thoroughly rejected the electoral politics definition of participation as to
exclude voting from their initial wave of studies. Verba’s later work (see Verba, Schlozman,
Brady, 1995) responded to the scholarly and popular shifts and did include protest actions as
participation. Milbrath’s second edition (Milbrath and Goel 1977) reflected the expansion in the
understanding of participation (although he continued to include nonactions as participation).
It is worth considering some of the reasons that these scholars, and others, expanded
political participation beyond electoral politics. First, the mass public had changed its behavior
from that observed by prior empirical scholars. The most obvious was the increase in protests
and other forms of contentious politics. But there also appeared to be increased interest in
politics coupled with increased alienation from governments. Energy was devoted to other types
of collective action. Second, as the scope of government action continued to expand, politics
impacted more spheres of life. Even beyond that, people perceived more of life as “political.”
Serious persons argued that family dynamics were integrally part of politics, for example. Third,
the development of empirical comparative political behavior led scholars to look beyond single
nation states and beyond democracies to examine participation. In countries where elections did
not authoritatively change rules and policies, this led necessarily to considering other activities
used by citizens to exert influence.
Political participation has subsequently been expanded much further, at least by some
scholars. Various authors include consumer actions, internet actions, many types of civic and
social actions. These are summarized well by Van Deth (2014) and will not be repeated here.
Once scholars expanded their idea of political participation beyond electoral politics,
definitions were needed in order to identify what counted. Verba and Nie (1972) stated,
“Political participation refers to those activities by private citizens that are more or less directly
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aimed at influencing the selection of governmental personnel and/or the actions they take.” (p.
2)3 Verba, Schlozman, and Brady’s 1995 version of the definition differs subtly but is
substantively similar to the earlier one: “By political participation we refer simply to activity
that has the intent or effect of influencing government action—either directly by affecting the
making or implementation of public policy or indirectly by influencing the selection of
people who make those policies” (Verba et al. 1995, p. 38). The “aimed at” and “intent or
effect” language are both included to include unsuccessful activities as participation; if someone
voted for a losing candidate or unsuccessfully tried to have an environmental policy adopted,
their actions would still be considered participation.
All of the above authors primarily used political participation as a dependent variable and
oriented their work to explaining who took part and who did not. 4 Although the 1995 Verba
definition includes activities that have the “effect” of influencing outcomes, where intent might
be altogether absent, an explanation of why people participate necessarily takes account of their
situation, including their subjective reasons.
An alternative research agenda takes political participation as in input, as an independent
variable which can lead to other political or economic outcomes. This approach is represented
by Huntington and Nelson (1976). Their focus on the tension between democracy and economic
development, and their argument that too much of the former can inhibit the latter, led them to
include as participation “mobilized” activities, such as mass marches by union members in
Argentina. Verba et al. (1995, pp. 38–39) restrict their study to voluntary activity, which they
define as follows: ‘By voluntary activity we mean participation that is not obligatory—no one is
Verba Nie and Kim (1978) offer an almost identical definition, but add the qualifier of “legal” activities and offer
some reasons for not considering protest. Of course, much protest is legal, so this is another example of the
definitions not quite capturing what each scholar means.
4
Part III of Participation in America (Verba and Nie, 1972) is a major exception to this point, attempting as it does
to delineate the policy consequences of differing levels of participation.
3
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forced to volunteer—and that receives no pay or only token financial compensation.’ In contrast,
although Huntington and Nelson’s initial definition is similar to Verba et al.’s, “By political
participation we mean activity by private citizens designed to influence government decisionmaking” (Huntington and Nelson 1976, p. 3), they soon include a twist. Huntington and Nelson
(1976, p. 7) explicitly include not only ‘autonomous’ participation but also ‘mobilized’
participation, defined as ‘activity that is designed by someone other than the actor to influence
governmental decision-making’. Under that definition, they would include as a participant a
worker who attends a rally because his boss threatens to demote him otherwise, even if the
worker has no intent of affecting government.
Once the concept of political participation expanded beyond electoral politics, the
differences in the research agendas became more material. Of course the agendas overlap, since
the identity of participants can affect the consequences of participation. Moreover if participation
increases efficacy then it increases further participation.
Nonetheless, as noted earlier, these different approaches have implications for the
treatment of the actor’s intention. For the second agenda motivation is irrelevant. If we focus on
impact on the system – then intent may matter less. An act of political participation has an effect
whatever the individual’s intention in undertaking it. The communist studies literature on
“mobilization” has bearing here. If Peron organized a march of union members to demonstrate
power to stay in power, did it matter whether a given individual marched because he supported
Peron or because his union shop foreman told him to do so? Does it matter if the anti-war rally
crowd came for the politics, or for the band? For the first agenda, intention to change politics
might not be required to consider something political participation. But an account of why some
people act while others do not may well involve an inquiry into their reasons. Empirically, most
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analysts coming from this perspective have pointed to interest in politics as a ubiquitous factor
strongly positively correlated with political participation. When they find interest has a weak
correlation, they offer institutional and contextual explanations. For the third perspective, the one
oriented to the effects of participation on the individual, intention must be crucial. The
distinction between autonomous and mobilized activity is important when one focuses on the
impact of participation upon the actor. It is difficult to develop efficacy from an act you did not
know you had undertaken.
All of the above agendas, however, leave open the problem of potentially including
almost anything as political participation. Contemporary scholars face a harder task than our
predecessors in delineating political participation, and these interact with the different agendas
outlined above, due in large part to two factors. First, the old approach of restricting political
participation to activities connected to electoral politics is clearly inadequate. The boundaries of
government have become blurred making it more difficult to separate the political from the
nonpolitical. Many actors are capable of authoritatively distributing value as the economic and
political systems interact and globalize. While it is still clear that activities directed towards
influencing who has in power in government are political participation, much else surely also is
participation. Second, new actions have been developed, including ones based on the internet,
which pose the question as to whether they “count” as political activity. The effect of these
processes has been to leave political participation an even fuzzier concept than before.
The first factor complicates the task of ascertaining what is political or policy and what is
not. When political participation meant participating in an election, the answer was clear. Once
we move beyond elections, however, clarity disappears. If we consider the perspective which
focuses upon the impact of participation, and exclude considerations of motivation, almost
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anything could be included. As the world has become more globally interconnected, and as
economic actors transcend state boundaries and in some cases supersede state powers, it becomes
harder to argue that economic actions are not political. The definitional problem goes deeper,
however. If we admit as political participation anything that can change politics or policy, then
virtually everything a person does could be included in the definition. Any consumption
decision affects someone’s profits and corporate power which in turn can affect political power.
Even deeply personal choices could be seen as political. A decision to have zero children or five
children has consequences for policy and politics, although rarely would this decision be counted
as political participation. But consider that governments do adopt pro and anti-natalist policies
partly in response to the reproductive decisions made by their populations. Moreover, people’s
reproductive decisions have implications for the distribution of resources, sometimes
immediately, such as in using census figures to determine distribution of subsidies. And these
decisions affect the distribution of political power across groups and regions over time.
On the other side, if we make motivation a key deciding factor in what counts as political,
then again almost anything could be included. Some (few) individuals do decide to have larger
families to attempt to increase the power of their group, and thus for them reproduction is an act
of political participation. More commonly, scholars who propose defining participation by
intention talk about consumer activities (buying or boycotting products) and internet activities.
If someone buys a product because they agree with the political (or environmental) views of the
manufacturer, that counts as political participation. But then again almost any action taken by a
politically aware person could be so classified. Moreover, there may be no way for an outside
observer, whether a scholar or a political target, to be aware that the action is political. If a
person buys Brand A instead of Brand B of soap, and that person’s political intent remains
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locked in the privacy of her mind, an observer could more easily conclude that she preferred the
color or scent of one to the other than that she was participating politically.
These considerations suggest several boundaries for the concept of political participation.
First, consider the agenda focused upon explaining individuals’ actions. If any action is included
as long as the person thinks he or she has some political motive, then we cannot distinguish
between activities that the person would do anyway and those especially undertaken for political
purposes. If someone is going to take an action in any event – buy a shampoo or eating lentils
instead of chicken – then theories of why people act politically have no special relevance. The
micro study of participation collapses into an analysis of any type of behavior. Moreover, if
political participation includes anything someone thinks might be political, then organized
political action becomes more difficult. People can subjectively “let themselves off the hook”
thinking that they are doing politics when they are only living a conscious life. Recent research
on “slactivism” suggests that making a show of one’s preference can reduce the motivation to
engage in action that could make a difference in outcomes. (reference) On the other hand, too
strict a requirement that the person acts with the intention of participating in politics is also too
narrow, especially if that is required to be the sole or dominant motive. From rational choice
theory we know that instrumental objectives are rarely sufficient to produce action (given the
low probability of success). Peoples’ actions usually also have motives including a sense of
duty, a feeling of solidary, or other individual side benefits. In general, recruitment is very
important in producing activity. So we exclude too much if we do not also include as a political
participant the person who takes an action because he wishes to please his spouse. Motives are
often complex and mixed, and pure political ones unlikely to be sufficient to lead to action by a
member of the mass public.
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Now consider the second agenda, which focuses upon the impact upon the political
system. From that perspective, an action taken secretly and privately with no public component
would be unlikely to have an effect, and therefore would not count as participation, whatever the
person’s motive. How does Nike know if people buy Adidas shoes to protest Nike plant
conditions, or just because they like their competitor’s shoes better? As that example suggests, a
consumption action accompanied by publicity and organization can indeed have potential policy
consequences. Van Deth suggests that consumer decisions might be political “if the shopper
explicitly expresses his intention that the purchase should be understood as an utterance against
import regulation” (emphasis added) (2014, p. 10). But an expressed intention to one’s friend or
spouse does not suffice. The boycott of Nike products was accompanied by a very public media
campaign complaining about the factories and urging consumer action. Similarly, the boycott of
California grapes furthered Cesar Chavez’s efforts to organize farmworkers because it was clear,
via massive information and other organizing, what objective the boycotters were pursuing. It is
crucial that the action be taken in a way that the target could plausibly be aware of the political
motivation. This will almost certainly require organization and publicity. One boundary
suggested by the focus on impact upon the system is to define political participatory acts as only
including those which are public and which can be connected to some public end comprehensible
to observers.
This second agenda, with the focus on effect, does not readily support include
consumption of political information as a form of political participation. If people read about
politics, whether in a newspaper or by accessing a web page, they increase their political
information. The fact that they access the information might be taken as an indicator of interest
in politics. But neither interest nor information are participation, nor do they influence anyone
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else. In fact, they are useful independent variables which may lead to participation. Conflating
them with the activity vitiates their utility for that purpose. With some mental gymnastics one
might be able to argue that clicking on a web page has an effect beyond the person and thus
should count as participation. A group of graduate students argued that clicking affects the
search algorithms and will make the page appear higher in subsequent searches by others. That
seems a very weak reed. On the other hand, if people spread information to other people, for
example by forwarding web pages, that is the equivalent of discussing politics with others, albeit
with a new technology. Some authors excluded discussion from participation. It seems quite
sensible to include discussion if the discussion is intended to influence the views of someone
else.
For the first agenda, where we focus upon motivation, there is a slightly stronger
argument to be made for including reading about politics as a form of participation, if that is
what the individual thinks he or she is doing. However, the point above about keeping the
distinction so that knowledge and interest retain their useful roles as explanators has even more
force from this perspective.
The more challenging problem from the perspective of the second agenda is defining the
boundary for actions which are political. The core seems clear; all would include actions in a
democracy which directly impact electoral politics, as elections are the one determinative source
of popular power. Almost all would include actions which directly attempt to impact
government policy-making. But reasonable people may disagree about the examples above.
Many might see the grape boycott as political, given government involvement in labor rights;
many, but probably fewer would see the Nike boycott as political. Many would disagree as to
whether purchasing only vegan foods is political. This disagreement is unlikely to be resolved.
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Thus even consideration of the research agendas already delineated leaves unclear the
division between the political and the nonpolitical, a key element in disputes over the boundaries
of the concept. I think some progress on this issue can be made by going back to more
fundamental reasons for studying political participation. In particular, the study of political
participation informs reflection on the possibility of self-government and of the conditions it
requires. If we care about self-government, then the question is when and whether people will
do those things that are needed for self-government. When people just take part in their normal
lives in the normal way does not further that goal, in contrast to when they act in the public
sphere in ways that make possible the exchange and refinement of opposing views and the
counting up of popular opinion. I suggest that argues for keeping political participation political
and distinct from more general civic and social participation, which are worthy and weighty
topics in their own right. In order for self-government to function, people need to pay attention
to government and politics and provide inputs directed towards those spheres. Civic or social
participation is less targeted. Let me give one example. In the United States, many high schools
and religious groups encourage or require students to engage in some type of community service
project. Strikingly, the students are strongly discouraged or in fact not allowed to take part in
anything that smells political. Thus, a student can organize a blood drive, but cannot get
involved in a political campaign or organize a protest or contact city hall. As a result, teenagers
get a very strong message about politics being somewhat dubious, while social engagement is
encouraged. If we conflate the two, we lose the ability to ascertain when and why some people
do become active in the political process.
But what actions are directed towards the political? In order to maintain the distinction, it
may be useful as a first step to think of the political sphere as the arena of government decisions,
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and thus participation as actions taken that can influence government, as in Van Deth II. In a
moment I will address a broader conception of the political sphere that includes community
activities without including all civic engagement (a variant of Van Deth III). For now, consider
what influences government and its policies. The realist view is that governments (and their
members or parties) want to keep power, and ultimately will take actions so as to keep power. In
an electoral democracy, this means keeping votes. The old impulse to equate political
participation with electoral politics stems from this idea but it is too narrow. Leaders and parties
who want power respond to other signals that votes may be won or lost, and these signals come
from many means of conveying popular sentiment, including those in Van Deth I and Van Deth
II. Note however that in his discussion of Rule 5 Van Deth (2014, pp. 8-9) seems to equate the
actions in definition II with protest and state-challenging activities. His narrower definition in
Rule 5 and his flow chart support what I argue is the more appropriate interpretation, that these
activities include many activities which are not regime challenging or contentious in the way we
normally use these terms. When a group organizes to object to the location of a new motorway
(as has consistently been done in my area to oppose a planning commission deciding to route a
tollway into a favorite surfing beach), this indeed may challenge a particular decision, but it is
hardly a regime challenging action. It does however provide a strong signal that subsequent
electoral support from those engaged in the action depends upon attending to their demand.
The trickier question is how coherently to expand the concept of participation to include
other organized community actions without encompassing all of “problem solving and helping
others” (Zukin et al. 2006, p. 7). Van Deth defines political participation III by including
“activities . . . aimed at solving collective or community problems. Notice that the character of
the problem dealt with has to be collective or shared” (2014, p. 10). The objective seems correct;
15
the criterion seems still too broad. When the Parent Teacher Association of a private school
organizes a fair to raise money to provide art supplies for the students, the actions of the parents
who work on the project seem to fit this definition, and they are engaged in a civic action, but it
does not seem political. From the realist perspective, an incumbent or potential government
could ignore the action and the implicit needs entirely without impact upon its prospects for
power. The distinction may lie in whether the community problem is in an arena either subject
to government involvement or one in which increasing government involvement is part of the
target of the action. But that perhaps is still too narrow. One might broaden further by also
considering these community actions as political if they 1) make demands upon collective
community resources or 2) involve potential or realized conflict with other groups in the
community, so that a resolution of power relations will be required. In either of these cases, the
realist view would suggest that those in power would interpret these actions as signaling the
likelihood of future support. I have in the past globally included as political participation any
action “working with others to solve a local or community problem” but find it hard to develop a
rationale for a definition that broad.
Importantly, under any of these approaches to the nature of the target, political
participation would not include unorganized, personal choice, consumer behavior. That indeed
may have important effects upon the market, but that is the sphere of the market. If the activity
is organized and directed towards influencing, say, government regulation, then it would fall into
Van Deth II and if directed towards identifying a problem in need of regulation, into Van Deth
III.
The realist view of what influences government can itself be broadened. An idealist
would argue that government action is also governed by the incumbents wanting to do what “the
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people” want. If so, then again the same activities as admitted by a realist would comprise
political participation.
A third source of influence upon government decisions applies both to democratic and
authoritarian regimes, with more force to the latter. Governments attempt to maintain order and
forestall rebellion. This provides motive to pay attention to popular desires, and the forms of
political participation already discussed convey these. The difference from the other objectives it
that the desire to maintain order gives protest actions more force. It also may somewhat expand
the definition of political action to include more instances of civil disobedience.
All of the above approaches, whatever the actual definition, tend at least implicitly to see
participation as directed towards policy formation. But governmental decision making can also
include specific implementation of policy, such as providing one person rather than another a
subsidized apartment or a seat in a training program. A separate literature, not generally
included as the political participation literature, has addressed “implementation” of policies. In
an authoritarian regime, electoral control of government no longer exists. Nonetheless, there is
still political participation. As noted above, although the people no longer select the rulers, the
rulers still need to keep the population reasonably satisfied to forestall revolt, and, to do so, they
need information on the people’s preferences, and they need to respond to discontent.
Implementation was brought conceptually into political participation by Tianjin Shi as he
wrestled with what political participation meant in China of the 1980s (1997). He argued that
several important differences in China’s system (as of the time of his field work) led to
including different actions than in the studies in democratic regimes. These include the (non)
role of the vote and thus leaders’ motives to advance via a well-running local unit, the inability to
influence policy and hence a focus on implementation, the difficulty of gaining from collective
17
action given the extent of central government control of resources, and finally, the control by
government of most aspects of life. Thus he defined political participation as “activities by
private citizens aimed at influencing the actual results of governmental policy”; “actual results”
because people “may be able to change the impact of government policy on them without
changing the policies themselves” (p. 21). Therefore he included as political participation
actions taken to affect the implementation for oneself, such as obtaining better housing or a
school seat for a child. These actions included many which European and U.S. authors would
have placed outside of political activity, notably using connections and many different types of
contact actions. Shi’s study raises the more profound point about how we define political
participation in a context where people have little influence on the government and where the
government is intimately intertwined with what elsewhere would be the private sector.
Finally, let me directly address internet activism, as discussed by Hosch-Dayican (2014).
Much excitement surrounds various types of internet based behavior. The discussion above
would admit most of this as political participation, with the important exception of simply
visiting a web page. That latter is equivalent to reading about politics. Importantly, many of the
cited types of web activism are previous modes by different technical means. Thus, sending an
email is a form of contact, as are many other web actions. Other web actions, such as using
social media to organize a group, are a new means of organizing to address an issue or a problem
or the government (depending upon the target). Yet others are another means of discussing
politics or of attempting to persuade someone else of your point of view. Only one web-based
activity strikes me as possibly more substantively new. With the internet, individuals can
communicate with each other directly in a way that generates a substantial body of opinion
which then often is indeed accessed by third parties, which could include government officials or
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other leaders. Thus instead of direct contact, since the communication is not addressed to the
officials, a new entity is created.
Conclusion.
Multiple objectives inspire the study of political participation. A single definition of the
concept does not suffice for all. Van Deth’s (2014) development of a family of definitions
within a single conceptual framework is thus a very useful contribution.
The three agendas identified here – motives of participants, effects upon political
outcomes, effects upon the individual – lead to differing conclusions about the role of
intentionality in the definition. For research focused upon the effects upon the individual,
intention is crucial. For research focused upon the effects upon the system, the individual’s
intentions are irrelevant. For research focused upon the motives of participants, the intentions of
the actor could matter, but not necessarily. Few people take few actions primarily because they
think the act will change the political world; other motives figure largely. When the research
focuses upon an individual’s reasons for participating, however, the study collapses into a
general study of action if political participation includes any act of normal life undertaken with
only an incidental thought by the actor that there is some political content. This agenda makes
more sense if acts of political participation are beyond those conducted incidentally in the normal
course of life but instead require some effort. Under both the agenda of effects upon the system
and motives of participants, private, unorganized consumer behavior I argue falls outside of the
concept of political participation.
The line between the political and the non political remains problematic even after
consideration of these different agendas. I proposed that the normative objective, of
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understanding the feasibility of self government, might help demarcate that boundary, but even
that is not quite adequate. Disputes will remain, but perhaps somewhat narrower in scope.
New forms of civic and social engagement are clearly very widespread and important
phenomena. Their study is crucial. Nothing stated above should be taken as suggesting
otherwise. However, precisely because of their importance, it is valuable to keep the distinction
between the political and less political spheres (with the non political being perhaps a third
variant). That distinction permits us to ask questions about how activity in one generates activity
in another, how response to one affects response to another. Merging them into a single concept
of citizen “action” impoverishes our ability to understand the world.
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