What is Political Participation?

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics

What is Political Participation?
Jan W. van Deth
Subject: Political Behavior, Political Sociology Online Publication Date: Nov 2016
DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.68

Summary and Keywords

Vibrant democracies are characterized by a continuous expansion of the available forms

of participation. This expansion has confronted many researchers with the dilemma of
using either a dated conceptualization of participation excluding many new modes of
political action or stretching their concept to cover almost everything. Demarcation
problems are especially evident for many newer, “creative,” “personalized,” and
“individualized” modes of participation such as political consumption, street parties, or
guerrilla gardening, which basically concern nonpolitical activities used for political
purposes. Moreover, the use of Internet-based technologies for these activities
(“connective action”) makes it almost impossible to recognize political participation at
first sight. Because social, societal, and political developments in democratic societies
have made the search for a single encompassing definition of political participation
obsolete, an alternative approach is to integrate the core features of political
participation in a conceptual map. Five modes cover the whole range of political
participation systematically and efficiently, based on the locus (polity), targeting
(government area or community problems), and circumstance (context or motivations) of
these activities. While the rise of expressive modes of participation especially requires
the inclusion of contextual information or the aims and goals of participants, attention is
paid to the (dis)advantages of including these aspects as defining criteria for political
participation. In this way, the map offers a comprehensive answer to the question “what
is political participation” without excluding future participatory innovations that are the
hallmark of a vibrant democracy.

Keywords: democracy, participation, protest, voting, elections, collective action, citizens, Internet

Participation and Democracy

Political participation can be loosely defined as citizens’ activities affecting politics. Ever
since the famous funeral speech of Pericles (431 BC) politicians and scholars have

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date: 01 December 2016