Dietlind Stolle Marc Hooghe

McGill University University of Leuven

Emerging Repertoires of Political Action?

A Review of the Debate on Participation Trends in Western Societies

Paper presented at the ECPR Joint Sessions

April 13-18, 2004
Uppsala (Sweden)

Session 24:
Emerging Repertoires of Political Action
 Abstract

This paper has a twofold ambition. In the paper itself we present an overview and a
critical analysis of the current debate about the transformation of civic engagement in
Western societies. The argument that civic life and social capital are declining in Western
democracies, and particularly in the United States, has been received with much
scepticism. While some authors question the accuracy of downward trends for the US,
others offer evidence that the same trend does not hold for other Western societies. Still
others accuse the decline literature of being one-sided as it fails to incorporate new forms
of participation, while at the same time there are those who argue that mass participation
has become obsolete as a means of ensuring the vitality of democratic systems. In this
paper we specifically address the third thesis: that the decline of old and traditional
participation forms has been compensated by the rise of new participation acts and
repertoires.

In the appendix to this paper (separate file) we present some empirical evidence for these
claims. A summary review of the various waves of the World Values Survey, and a
comparison between the 1974 Political Action survey and the 2002 European Social
Survey show that while some more traditional (‘conventional’) forms of participation
seem to be eroding, this is not the case for more recent participation acts. In an
exploration of the European Social Survey, we try to determine the characteristics of the
new participation forms, before venturing into a discussion about the democratic
potential, and/or the democratic pitfalls associated with this transformation process.

Note: This is a shortened and adapted version of a review article that will appear in the British
Journal of Political Science, 34(3). Both authors contributed equally to this paper, and they wish
to thank Ric Uslaner, Henry Milner and the BJPS reviewers for their comments on an earlier
version of the article. © BJPS 2004.
Introduction

In his 1790 address to the Académie Française in Paris, Condorcet noted that
every new generation has a tendency to accuse itself of being less civic-minded than
previous cohorts.1 Two centuries later, this argument has once again regained front-page
status. The debate is currently focussed on the question of whether or not social capital
and civic engagement are declining in Western societies. In his academic best-seller
Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam argues that younger age cohorts, socialized in the
prosperous economic conditions of the 1960s and onwards, are less inclined to engage in
community life and in politics, and also less likely to trust their fellow citizens.2 By
contrast, the ‘long civic generation,’ born roughly between 1910 and 1940, is portrayed
as much more motivated in these respects. They readily volunteer in community projects,
read newspapers, and take on more social responsibilities.3 In this view, a process of
generational replacement is responsible for a steady decline of social capital and civic
engagement in American society. As the long civic generation is replaced by younger age
cohorts, the social capital stock of American communities slowly diminishes. The
indicators used to substantiate this claim are numerous and diverse: measures for voter
turnout, attendance of club meetings, generalised trust, the number of common family
dinners, the number of card games played together, and even respect for traffic rules. All
of these attitudes and behaviours, it is argued, depict a significant downward trend.

Although Putnam is by far the most vocal of all scholars in the ‘decline of social
capital’-choir, he certainly is not the only author describing an erosion of traditional
societal relations. Almost two decades ago, Robert Bellah and his team warned that more
individualistic motivations are threatening the traditional social bonds in American
society.4 Robert Lane, among others, finds that this decline in social cohesion is not just a
phenomenon of American society, but can be seen as a manifestation of a general process
of disenchantment in Western societies: ‘The haunting spirit is manifold: (…) increasing
distrust of each other and of political and other institutions, declining belief that the lot of
the average man is getting better, a tragic erosion of family solidarity and community
integration (…)’5

These arguments have encountered fierce academic opposition. The Bowling

Alone thesis has been variously characterized as plainly wrong, pessimistic, and
traditional. A number of authors have claimed that Putnam idolizes the vanished
hierarchical world of the 1950s, in which most women were home-makers and therefore
had more time at their hands to engage in various civic duties. Others depict the decline
thesis as pure nostalgia, a manifestation of the longing for a civic and engaged era that
has clearly ended. As with many hotly debated phenomena in political science, these
have come in multiple or even contradictory versions.

1
Badinter, Elisabeth and Robert Badinter, Condorcet, 1743-1794. (Paris: Fayard, 1989).
2
Putnam, Robert, Bowling Alone. The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 2000).
3
Putnam, Bowling Alone, p. 247ff.
4
Bellah, Robert et al., Habits of the Heart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).
5
Lane, Robert, The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).
 While some social scientists have claimed that the numbers do not show the
erosion of social capital6, others portray the decline of civic engagement as another
manifestation of American exceptionalism. Still other authors have taken the argument a
step further; while they accept the claim that traditional forms of cohesion and
participation are losing ground, they emphasize that newer forms of participation and
interaction, all too easily dismissed in the work of Putnam and others, can replace
traditional forms. Yet another body of researchers largely accepts the evidence
substantiating the decline thesis, but they do not, unlike Putnam, perceive this as being a
threat to the viability of democratic political systems. Conversely, they argue that
processes of postmodernization have produced a cohort of critical citizens who embrace
democratic values, such as autonomy, self-expression and support for democracy.7

In the remainder of this part of the paper, we first give an overview of the decline
thesis, followed by a review of the four different types of arguments and evidence
formulated against it. In the final section, we show the limits of these critiques and build
a research agenda aimed at testing the grounds more thoroughly for each one of these
positions.

Worries about social capital and participation

Concerns about the erosion of traditional social ties and institutions have always
been a centre of attention in the social sciences. As early as the 19th century, authors like
Tönnies, Durkheim and Weber wondered how social order and cohesion could be
maintained given the political and economic modernization of Western societies. Since
the 1980s, philosophical debates between liberals and communitarians seem to have
fostered a revived interest in the maintenance of social cohesion among political and
social scientists. The most systematic account of the potential erosion of social and civic
life, however, can be found in the work of Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam. 8
According to Putnam, the loss of confidence and degradation of social ties has pervaded
all aspects of society. Not only do Americans participate less actively in all kinds of
voluntary associations, but they also refrain from typical political involvement, such as
membership in political parties. Drawing on commercial life-style surveys, Putnam finds
a negative trend even with regard to various forms of social interactions involving face-
to-face contact beyond formally organised engagements; indeed, even the frequencies of
traditional common meal at the family dinner table, visits to friends and neighbours, card

6
Ladd, Everett C, ‘The Data Just Don’t Show Erosion of America’s ‘Social Capital,’’ The Public
Perspective, June 1996, 5-22.
7
Inglehart, Ronald, Modernization and Postmodernization (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
8
Putnam, Robert, ‘Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital,’ Journal of Democracy, 6(1)
(1995), 65-78; Putnam, Robert, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community;
Putnam, Robert, ed., Democracies in Flux. The Evolution of Social Capital in Contemporary Society
(Oxford: Oxford University Press 2002); Pharr, Susan and Robert Putnam, eds., Disaffected Democracies
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Putnam, Robert and Lewis Feldstein, Better Together.
Restoring the American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003).
games with friends, and social dinners at restaurants have all been the victims of this
trend.

Especially with regard to the political domain, an impressive array of empirical

evidence has been marshalled to substantiate the claims about the decline of institutional
trust and civic engagement. Since the 1960s Americans have been losing trust in their
government and in government institutions, a trend that has been documented for most
liberal democracies.9 In addition, various conventional forms of political participation
have lost much of their appeal. Political parties have traditionally served as a connection
mechanism between citizens and the political system, but in a number of countries the
party system is confronted with a rapid decline of party identification. Not only are
membership figures dwindling,10 especially among young people,11 but in addition
citizens seem to rely less on ideological clues provided by political parties to establish
their own political and world views; as a consequence, voter volatility is on the rise. 12
Partly as a result of diminishing trust in government and the weakening of party
identification, voter turnout as well has followed a downward spiral. This phenomenon is
not limited to the United States, but has indeed been shown to be prevalent in other
Western societies.13

In sum, studies supporting the decline thesis not only describe and document the
erosion of traditional integration mechanisms; they also interpret this evolution as a
fundamental threat to the survival of healthy communities and democratic political
systems. As stated at the outset, this kind of literature has been met with fierce
opposition, the different facets of which will be revisited and examined in the remainder
of this review article.

9
Lipset, Seymour M. and William Schneider, The Confidence Gap (New York: Free Press, 1983); Nye,
Joseph, Philip Zelikow and David King, eds., Why People don’t Trust Government (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1997); Jennings, M. Kent, ‘Political Trust and the Roots of Devolution,’ in Valerie
Braithwaite and Margaret Levi, eds., Trust and Governance (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1998), pp.
218-244; Pharr and Putnam, eds., Disaffected Democracies.
10
Mair, Peter and Ingrid van Biezen, ‘Party Membership in Twenty European Democracies, 1980-2000,’
Party Politics, 7(1) (2001), 5-22.
11
Hooghe, Marc, Dietlind Stolle and Patrick Stouthuysen, ‘Head Start in Politics. The Recruitment
Function of Youth Organizations of Political Parties in Belgium (Flanders),’ Party Politics, 10(2) (2004),
193-212.
12
Wattenberg, Martin, The Decline of American Political Parties (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1996); Schmitt, Hermann and Sören Holmberg, ‘Political Parties in Decline?’ in Hans-Dieter Klingemann
and Dieter Fuchs, eds., Citizens and the State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 95-133; Dalton,
Russell and Martin Wattenberg, eds., Parties without Partisans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
13
Nie, Norman, Sidney Verba and John Petrocik, The Changing American Voter (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1979); Teixeira, Ruy, The Disappearing American Voter (Washington D.C.: Brookings
Institution, 1992); Jackman, Robert and Ross Miller, ‘Voter Turnout in the Industrial Democracies during the
1980s,’ Comparative Political Studies, 27 (1995), 467-492; Lijphart, Arend, ‘Unequal Participation.
Democracy’s Unresolved Dilemma,’ American Political Science Review, 91(1) (1997), 1-14; Putnam, ed.,
Democracies in Flux. The Evolution of Social Capital in Contemporary Society.
Trench-Warfare Revisited

Four distinct modes of criticism have emerged to counter the decline thesis. First,
one group of authors rejects it on empirical grounds. Their claim is that authors
supporting the Bowling Alone thesis did not get their numbers right and therefore do not
offer an adequate description of real trends in contemporary American society.14
Proposing a careful reconsideration of time-series data for the United States, these critics
argue that there are no grounds for pessimistic concern about participation levels and
social cohesion.

A second group of critics accepts the decline thesis with the reservation that it is
merely another example of American exceptionalism. They claim that in other Western
societies, social capital and civic engagement are not declining to the same extent as in
the United States.15 This particular criticism calls for wide-ranging comparative research
on meaningful indicators of social capital and civic engagement.

The third critique accepts that traditional social and civic participation have
declined, but accuses the decline thesis of conceptual one-sidedness, in that it fails to pay
attention to the simultaneous rise of new participation and forms of interaction that fulfil
the same functions with regard to socialization and interest mediation.16 This view is
echoed by feminist scholars who argue that the participation indicators being used in
most of the research focus too exclusively on formal participation acts, thus neglecting
more informal forms of connectedness and participation that are traditionally preferred by
women.17 This kind of criticism entails a fundamental challenge for survey and other
quantitative research, as new instruments will have to be developed to capture these
informal and network-based interactions before their social importance and prevalence
can be effectively assessed.

Finally, a fourth group of authors accepts the decline thesis, but disputes its
normative consequences. The decline of traditional participation formats is seen as
largely irrelevant for the future of democratic systems. The radical version of this

14
Schudson, Michael, ‘What if Civic Life didn’t Die?’ The American Prospect, (March, 1996), 17-28;
Ladd, Everett C, The Ladd Report (New York: Free Press, 1999); Paxton, Pamela, ‘Is Social Capital
Declining in the United States?’ American Journal of Sociology, 105(1) (1999), 88-127; Wuthnow, Robert,
‘The United States: Bridging the Privileged and the Marginalized?’ in Putnam, ed., Democracies in Flux,
pp. 59-101.
15
Hall, Peter, ‘Social Capital in Britain,’ British Journal of Political Science, 29(3) (1999), 417-461;
Mayer, Nonna, ‘Democracy in France: Do Associations Matter?’ in Marc Hooghe & Dietlind Stolle, eds.,
Generating Social Capital (New York: Palgrave, 2003), pp. 43-66; Norris, Pippa, Democratic Phoenix.
Reinventing Political Activism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Gabriel, Oscar et al,
Sozialkapital und Demokratie (Wien: Universitätsverlag, 2002); Torpe, Lars, ‘Social Capital in Denmark:
A Deviant Case?’ Scandinavian Political Studies, 26(1) (2003), 27-48.
16
Beck, Ulrich, The Reinvention of Politics (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1997); Lichterman, Paul, The Search
for Political Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Castells, Manuel, The Rise of the
Network Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997); Eliasoph, Nina, Avoiding Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998).
17
Inglehart, Ronald and Pippa Norris, Rising Tide. Gender Equality and Cultural Change around the
World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
argument avers that democracies can prosper even in the absence of conventional
widespread mass participation, as highly educated postmaterialist citizens have other
means at their disposal to get their voices heard in political decision-making.18 This thesis
calls for a different test altogether: in the absence of mass-based interest mediation
organizations, how can we ensure that governments and political systems are accessible
to citizen influence?

The disentangling of these distinct counterarguments to the Bowling Alone thesis

is absolutely essential if we are to arrive at scientifically-tested findings about the actual
evolution of social capital and civic engagement in the US and other democratic societies.
We examine each of the arguments and their evidence in turn.

‘The numbers don’t match…’

The first argument against communitarian pessimism is largely empirical: it is

stated that the available data simply do not support the conclusion that engagement and
cohesion are on the decline in the United States. A number of authors question the
validity of the data used by Putnam and other authors, in addition to their method of
analysis.19 Building upon a careful analysis of the General Social Survey for the period
1975-1994, both Paxton and Wuthnow argue that not all social capital and civic
engagement indicators seem to be declining simultaneously. Their conclusion is that
generalized trust has been eroding significantly throughout this period, but the same
declivity cannot be observed with respect to associational membership, or even trust in
institutions. While in 1975 respondents in the General Social Survey reported on average
1.77 group memberships, this was still 1.61 in the 1994 Survey, and the trend line does
not show any obvious or significant decline.20

These kinds of empirical criticisms obviously call for a careful re-examination

and re-interpretation of American time-series data. However, an important issue in such
an analysis is that fewer and fewer citizens agree to participate in national or cross-
national surveys.21 In the US National Elections Studies (NES), for example, the response
rate declined from 80% in the 1960’s to about 60% in the year 2000,22 which by itself
might serve as an indication for a civic decline. Most importantly, declining response
rates seriously threaten the validity of time-series data and analysis. As far as the decline
thesis is concerned, lower response rates will lead most likely to an overestimation of

18
Inglehart, Modernization and Postmodernization; Inglehart, Ronald and Wayne Baker, ‘Modernization,
Cultural Change, and the Persistence of Traditional Values,’ American Sociological Review, 65(1) (2000),
19-51.
19
Schudson, ‘What if Civic Life didn’t Die?’; Ladd, The Ladd Report; Paxton, ‘Is Social Capital Declining
in the United States?’; McDonald, Michael and Samuel Popkin, ‘The Myth of the Vanishing Voter,’
American Political Science Review, 95(4) (2001), 963-974; Wuthnow, ‘The United States: Bridging the
Privileged and the Marginalized?’
20
Ladd, The Ladd Report.
21
de Heer, Wim, ‘International Response Trends: Results of an International Survey,’ Journal of Official
Statistics, 15(2) (1999), 129-142.
22
NES (2003). http://www.umich.edu/~nes/studyres/datainfo/dataqual.htm
participation in the most recent surveys, as civic engagement in the real world and co-
operation to participate in a survey are strongly related. Therefore, one can assume that in
contemporary surveys participation is overestimated more strongly than in surveys of a
previous era, and this can be used as an argument to strengthen the decline thesis. In
short, the issue of declining responses in surveys has to be integrated into a statistical re-
evaluation of social capital and civic engagement time-series trends.

American exceptionalism?

A second critique invoked against the Bowling Alone thesis is that an erosion of
civic life may indeed be taking place in the United States, but that this phenomenon
should be seen as another manifestation of American exceptionalism. The same trend
cannot, the argument goes, be observed in other Western societies. At least for the
moment, we do not have any conclusive evidence that participation levels in general are
indeed declining in Western Europe as well as the United States23. Only for some specific
and rather traditional forms of participation has a general declining trend been
documented. In Europe too, for example, political parties and trade unions have lost
members in recent decades.24 With the notable exception of the Scandinavian countries,
voter turnout also shows a downward trend in most industrialised countries.25 It should be
remembered, however, that this decline has largely been a departure from the all-time
high that was recorded in the 1950s and the 1960s;26 even so, the trend is significantly
downward. Most blatant, perhaps, is the strong evidence for systematic decline of
political trust in most European countries, with notable exceptions in Germany and the
Netherlands.27 While in the mid-1990s scholars still expressed doubts about a general
decline of political trust,28 there is more certainty by the end of the decade.29 Overall,
European societies are plagued, as the United States is, by political disenchantment,
increasing cynicism and political alienation.

23
Hooghe, Marc, ‘Why Should We Be Bowling Alone? Cross-Sectional Results from a Belgian Survey on
Civic Participation,’ Voluntas, 14(1) (2003), 41-59.
24
Mair and van Biezen, ‘Party Membership in Twenty European Democracies, 1980-2000’; Ebbinghaus,
Bernhard and Jelle Visser, ‘When Institutions Matter: Union Growth and Decline in Western Europe, 1950-
1995,’ European Sociological Review, 15(2) (1999), 135-158; Putnam, ed., Democracies in Flux. The
Evolution of Social Capital in Contemporary Society.
25
Dalton and Wattenberg, eds., Parties without Partisans; Gray, Mark and Miki Caul, Declining Voter
Turnout in Advanced Democracies. Comparative Political Studies, 33(9) (2000), 1091-1121; Mair, Peter,
‘In the Aggregate: Mass Electoral Behaviour in Western Europe, 1950-2000,’ in Hans Keman, ed.,
Comparative Democratic Politics (London: Sage, 2002), pp. 122-141.
26
Norris, Democratic Phoenix. Reinventing Political Activism.
27
Inglehart, Modernization and Postmodernization; Listhaug, Ola, ‘The Dynamics of Trust in Politicians,’
in Klingemann & Fuchs, eds., Citizens and the State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 261-297;
Norris, P, ed., Critical Citizens. Global Support for Democratic Government (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1999).
28
Klingemann, Hans-Dieter and Dieter Fuchs eds., Citizens and the State (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1995).
29
Klingemann, Hans-Dieter, Mapping Political Support in the 1990s, in Pippa Norris, ed., Critical Citizens.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press 1999), pp. 31-56.
 With regard to forms of participation that are not expressly political, however,
results are far less convincing.30 The enormous amount of evidence assembled for the
Beliefs in Government project, for example, did not support the pessimistic conclusions in
this respect for West European countries.31 In line with this evaluation, no evidence has
been found of downward trends in non-political membership and civic participation
figures, or for that matter generalized trust across European societies.32 Nor do the
various country studies assembled in Democracies in Flux: The Evolution of Social
Capital in Contemporary Society offer any support for a clear pattern of decline in non-
political associational membership in European countries. Faced with this evidence, even
Putnam has recently acknowledged: ‘At the most general level, our investigation has
found no general and simultaneous decline in social capital throughout the
industrial/postindustrial world over the last generation.’33

These findings do not imply that there is no reason for concern in Western
European societies. It is entirely plausible that Europe will be confronted with the same
structural process of social change and its consequences as that witnessed in the United
States, but with a certain time lag. In the Netherlands, for example, participation has
dwindled among younger and well-educated cohorts.34 Similar observations have been
made in Canada; even though voter turnout has been stable for most age cohorts, the
youngest generation in Canada clearly lags behind.35 For the time being, however, we do
not have sufficient information to determine whether these younger age groups are
simply somewhat slower in picking up a participatory habit (because of extended
education, for example,) or whether their abstention will continue once they move on to
adulthood. Nevertheless, the fact that young people seem to refrain from political activity
could be an important finding. Previous studies have shown that those who begin
participating in elections immediately upon reaching voting age retain this habit even
many years later.36 Research suggests that the specific character of one’s first
experienced elections is particularly important for their further electoral involvement.37

30
Topf, Richard, ‘Beyond Electoral Participation,’ in Klingemann and Fuchs, eds., Citizens and the State
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 52-91; Dekker, Paul and Andries. van den Broek, ‘Civil
Society in Comparative Perspective: Involvement in Voluntary Associations in North America and Western
Europe,’ Voluntas, 9(1) (1998), 11-38; Hall, ‘Social Capital in Britain’; Putnam, Robert, Conclusion, in
Putnam, ed., Democracies in Flux (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 393-415; Hooghe, Marc,
‘Value Congruence and Convergence within Voluntary Associations,’ Political Behavior, 25(2) (2003),
151-175.
31
Klingemann and Fuchs, eds., Citizens and the State.
32
Gabriel et al., Sozialkapital und Demokratie.
33
Putnam, Conclusion, in Putnam, ed., Democracies in Flux, p. 410.
34
Dekker, Paul and Joep de Hart, ‘Het sociaal kapitaal van de Nederlandse kiezer,’ in M. Hooghe, ed.,
Sociaal kapitaal en democratie. (Leuven: Acco, 2000), pp. 83-112; Thomassen, Jacques, Cees Aarts and
Henk van der Kolk, eds., Politieke veranderingen in Nederland, 1971-1998 (Den Haag: SDU, 2000).
35
Blais, André, Elisabeth Gidengil, Richard Nadeau and Neil Nevitte. Generational Change and the
Decline of Political: The Case of Voter Turnout in Canada. Paper presented at the McGill Workshop
Citizenship on Trial: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Political Socialization of Adolescents, June 2002.
36
Plutzer, Eric, ‘Becoming a Habitual Voter: Inertia, Resources, and Growth in Young Adulthood,’
American Political Science Review, 96(1) (2002), 41-56.
37
Franklin, Mark, The Dynamics of Voter Turnout in Established Democracies since 1945 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004).
These findings are in line with the well-established mechanism that early life experiences
play an important role in shaping adult political behaviour.38

The ‘exceptionalism’ argument calls for a comparative longitudinal research

project across societies. A major challenge for this kind of research, however, is the
almost insurmountable lack of long-term empirical sources. Time-series data are either
not directly comparable to each other and/or to the US data sources, or they go back only
a few years, leaving researchers unable to formulate any definite conclusions. Although
various research efforts are underway to gather comparable and reliable data for a
number of European countries (the Civic Involvement and Democracy project (CID), for
example, as well as the European Social Survey (ESS)), for the foreseeable future the
empirical ground for this debate will remain much weaker in Europe than it is in the US.

Emerging substitutes?
The third argument against communitarian pessimism does not question the
figures and trends described in the erosion literature. These authors acknowledge the fact
that traditional participation and integration mechanisms, such as parties and trade unions
may indeed wear out in Western societies. The fundamental line of critique here is that
the communitarian authors put forward a one-sided description of social trends as a result
of their exclusive focus on the disappearance of traditional mechanisms. Meanwhile, the
communitarians are said to be neglectful of emerging participation styles and methods
that are rapidly replacing the old ones.39 The willingness to participate in politics and
societal affairs is still as strong as it was a few decades ago, critics argue, but this will no
longer translate into membership of traditional political organisations, a point already
made in the 1979 Political Action study.40 Rather, citizens today, especially younger
generations, prefer participating in non-hierarchical and informal networks, in addition to
a variety of life-style related sporadic mobilization efforts. Membership in informal local
parental groups, the tendency to consume politically, membership in advocacy networks,
the regular signing and forwarding of e-mail petitions, and the spontaneous organization
of protests and rallies are just a few examples of this phenomenon.41 The problem with
this argument is that systematic evidence on the new forms of involvements has yet to be
collected, and thus studies in this field are often anecdotal in nature (though two studies
discussed below do tackle this issue empirically.)
Structured ideologies seem less important as a mobilizing agent in these new
forms of protest and participation, and in a number of instances their role is replaced by

38
Jennings, M. Kent and Laura Stoker, ‘Generational Change, Life Cycle Processes and Social Capital,’
paper presented at the McGill Workshop Citizenship on Trial: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Political
Socialisation of Adolescents, June 2002.
39
Gundelach, Peter, ‘Social Transformation and New Forms of Voluntary Associations,’ Social Science
Information, 23(6) (1984), 1049-1081.
40
Barnes, Samuel, Max Kaase et al. (1979), Political Action. Beverly Hills: Sage; Eliasoph, Avoiding
Politics; Lichterman, The Search for Political Community.
41
Hustinx, Lesley and Frans Lammertyn, ‘Collective and Reflexive Styles of Volunteering: A Sociological
Modernization Perspective,’ Voluntas, 14(2) (2003), 167-187.
more emotional or personal motivations.42 One could refer here to the protest rallies
following the school shooting in Dunblane (Scotland), the violent protests that emerged
against paedophiles in Britain, and the silent marches against various incidents of street
violence in the Netherlands. These rallies were not organized by established
organizations or elite actors, but rather they emerged spontaneously as a kind of
emotional reaction in response to perceived threats against society. Nevertheless, they
have proven themselves to be politically effective, resulting, for example, in stricter
weapon laws in the United Kingdom.
The theoretical or anecdotal discussion of new action and participation repertoires
has also been supported by an empirical agenda. A rather famous example of this kind of
empirical criticism involves the way Putnam used declining membership figures of the
national American PTA (Parents Teachers Association) to support his claim that parental
involvement in the education of their children is on the wane. E.C. Ladd, as well as
Crawford and Levitt, draw attention to the fact that a large number of local PTA chapters
are no longer affiliated with the national umbrella organization, which would explain the
downturn of national PTA membership figures.43 To some extent this can be seen as a
simple empirical argument: national membership records of the PTA umbrella
organization no longer serve as a valid indicator for the total number of American parents
actively involved in the school education of their children. However, we also observe
here the emergence of a new and more loosely structured form of involvement. As Ladd
demonstrates, a preliminary analysis of various forms of parents’ involvement in two
selected American states shows that their engagement goes beyond the traditional PTA.
Instead, parents become involved in more localized, looser, and more fluid parent
organizations that are not captured in classic PTA membership statistics. These new
groups tend to be more issue-oriented, and they devote less attention to state level or
national policy issues.44

Although we are confronted with a large diversity in these new participation

mechanisms, they have common characteristics with regard to: 1) their structure; 2) the
substantive issues they address; 3) the ways in which they mobilize, and; 4) the style of
involvement by individual members; 5) they tend to be associated with a highly skewed
recruitment pattern.

First, these new forms of participation abandon traditional (that is to say formal
and bureaucratic) organizational structures in favour of horizontal and more flexible ones.
Loose connections, in other words, are rapidly replacing static bureaucracies.45 Instead of
collaborating in formal umbrella structures, these grassroots associations opt for co-
operation in flexible and horizontal networks that are better adapted to the needs of
42
Goodwin, Jeff, James Jasper and Francesca Polletta, eds., Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social
Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
43
Ladd, The Ladd Report, pp. 31-43; Crawford, Susan and Peggy Levitt, ‘Social Change and Civic
Engagement: the Case of the PTA,’ in Theda Skocpol and Morris Fiorina, eds., Civic Engagement in
American Democracy. Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1999), pp. 249-296.
44
Crawford and Levitt, ‘Social Change and Civic Engagement: the Case of the PTA,’ p. 283.
45
Wuthnow, Robert, Loose Connections. Joining Together in America’s Fragmented Communities
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).
information-driven societies.46 This kind of network structure can also be found in
various global organizations and mobilization efforts, which rely on loose contacts and
electronic communication to co-ordinate their actions for reform in trade regimes, labour
practices, human rights or environmental quality.47

Second, in general these new initiatives are also less concerned with institutional
affairs, such as party politics, which brings them into sharp contrast with more traditional
political organisations. Life-style elements are being politicized and although the actors
no longer label their action as being expressly ‘political,’ these preoccupations do lead to
political mobilization.48 These new forms of participation clearly break the traditional
boundaries between the public and the private sphere; some authors have heralded this
transition as the advent of ‘subpolitics,’ where daily life decisions take on a strong
political meaning.49 Micheletti, for example, describes how women in Sweden, largely
motivated by private concerns, started to fight food prices and became increasingly
involved in political discussions and further political protests.50 In other words, spheres
traditionally perceived as private, such as food consumption, have the potential to
become a platform for political mobilization. Eliasoph, by the same token, documents
how housewives avoid becoming entangled in large ideological debates about politics or
the environment, but instead prefer actions ‘close to home,’ such as those involving
consumer behaviour or household waste.51 The participation in a recycling project can
contribute to a feeling of connection with large-scale environmental issues, without
requiring any formal memberships or ideological identification.

Third, these new forms of participation tend to mobilize in a very characteristic

way. On the one hand, they rely on apparently spontaneous and irregular mobilization.
The signing of petitions, or participation in protests and consumer boycotts all seem
based on spontaneity, irregularity, easy exit and the possibility of shifting-in and shifting-
out. This is certainly the case with new, more emotion-driven forms of protest and
mobilization. While in October 1996 some 300,000 people (three per cent of Belgium’s
total population) participated in a protest rally against the inertia of their nation’s police

46
Castells, The Rise of the Network Society.
47
Bennett, W. Lance, ‘Branded Political Communication: Lifestyle Politics, Logo Campaigns, and the Rise
of Global Citizenship,’ in Michelle Micheletti, Andreas Føllesdal and Dietlind Stolle, eds., Politics,
Products and Markets. (New Brunswick: Transaction Press, 2004), pp. 101-126; Levi, Margaret and David
Olson, ‘The Battle in Seattle,’ Politics and Society, 28(3) (2000), 309-329.
48
Bennett, W. Lance, ‘The UnCivic Culture. Communication, Identity, and the Rise of Lifestyle Politics.’
Political Science and Politics, 31(4) (1998), 741-761; Bennett, ‘Branded Political Communication:
Lifestyle Politics, Logo Campaigns, and the Rise of Global Citizenship’; Eliasoph, Avoiding Politics.
49
Beck, The Reinvention of Politics.
50
Micheletti, Michelle, ‘Why More Women? Issues of Gender and Political Consumerism,’ in Michelle
Micheletti, Andreas Føllesdal and Dietlind Stolle, eds., Politics, Products, and Markets (New Brunswick:
Transaction Press, 2004), pp. 245-264.
51
Eliasoph, Avoiding Politics.
force in the face of abductions and killings of young children; two years later, though, the
organizing committee was out of business as its membership had all but evaporated.52

On the other hand, the rise of various check-book organizations implies that
passive members will become more important than has been the case in traditional mass-
membership organisations. Check-book activism does not rely on intensive and regular
face-to-face contact between members, and the organizational model of these
organizations no longer stresses voluntary participation in local chapters. Check-book
membership organizations operate mostly on a national scale, with a professional staff
relying on print and electronic media to stay in touch with their members.53 Such
memberships, too, allow for easy exit and spontaneous irregular involvement, which
renders this type of network much more vulnerable to sudden fluctuations in its
membership base and thus its income.54

Fourth, new forms of participation are potentially less collective and group-oriented in
character. This is the case even though they might be triggered by larger societal
concerns (such as global injustice), organized and supported by advocacy networks and
other loose organizations, and also have aggregate consequences (a change of corporate
practices, for example). Despite all this the actual act of participation is often
individualized in character, whether this involves the decision to forward a selected e-
mail as did Jonah Peretti, who subsequently triggered a world-wide response to Nike’s
footwear production practices,55 or whether it involves the decision to purchase a certain
product for ethical reasons.56 Such individualized acts do not necessarily lead to group
interaction or face-to-face meetings of the kind we typically encounter in unions,
voluntary groups, regular council meetings, and so forth. Passive memberships in check-
book organisations are relatively individualised acts as well. This leads to a certain
paradox: while this form of protest and participation can be seen as an example of co-
ordinated collective action, most participants simply perform this act alone, at home
before a computer screen, or in a supe²rmarket.
Fifth and finally, these new forms of participation raise the spectre of a highly biased
form of political engagement. In most cases, the new participation repertoire requires
quite some intellectual and political sophistication, and therefore, these new acts are
predominantly practiced by just a small portion of the entire population. With regard to

52
Hooghe, Marc & Gita Deneckere, ’La Marche Blanche en Belgique (octobre 1996), une mouvement de
masse spectaculaire mais éphémère,’ Le Mouvement Social, 202 (2003), 153-164.
53
Wollebæk, Dag & Per Selle, ‘The Importance of Passive Membership for Social Capital Formation,’ in
Marc Hooghe & Dietlind Stolle, eds., Generating Social Capital (New York: Palgrave, 2003), pp. 67-88.
54
Skocpol, Theda, Diminished Democracy. From Membership to Management in American Civic Life.
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003).
55
Peretti, Jonah and Michelle Micheletti, ‘The Nike Sweatshop Email: Political Consumerism, Internet,
and Culture Jamming’ in Michelle Micheletti, Andreas Føllesdal and Dietlind Stolle, eds., Politics,
Products, and Markets (New Brunswick: Transaction Press, 2004), pp. 127-144.
56
Micheletti, Michelle, Andreas Føllesdal and Dietlind Stolle, eds., Politics, Products, and Markets:
Exploring Political Consumerism Past and Present (New Brunswick: Transaction Press, 2004).
check-book activism and other money-mediated forms of civic engagement, the
inequality even becomes more blatant. While the availability of resources already plays a
major role in determining traditional volunteering and participation levels, inequalities
are even more outspoken with regard to donating money and comparable forms of
engagement (Verba, Schlozman & Brady 1995). The transformation toward more
intensive and demanding forms of participation, therefore, clearly entails the risk that this
will serve as a new political arena, that is open only to the well-off in society (see
appendix to this paper).

The argument that formal and fixed membership structures are being replaced by more
informal interaction repertoires is strongly reflected in the gender literature as well.
Scholars working on gender relations have argued that most of the current social capital
research is misguided because it looks in the wrong places for sources of social cohesion.
By focusing almost exclusively on the decline of formal organisations, the
communitarian authors fail to acknowledge the fact that there are many other ways for
people to participate and express political and social involvement.57 These critics would
argue that networks and social engagement can be found in daily social interactions,58
namely at the workplace,59 in schools and neighbourhoods,60 or in caring networks such
as baby-sitting circles and other informal child-care networks.61

Women, in general, tend to prefer more egalitarian networks, which are reflected in
some examples of ‘feminist organisations.’62 Lowndes’ point in particular urges us to
reconsider how informal and small-scale care networks actually contribute to the
maintenance of social cohesion within a society. A typical example would be young
mothers in the suburbs jointly bringing their children to and picking them up from school.
These kinds of arrangements are mostly informal and ad hoc, and they are therefore
usually not registered in survey research on participation. Nevertheless, they are likely to
contribute significantly to the maintenance of social cohesion and social interaction and
the advancement of quality of life within these suburbs, as well as to the learning of civic
skills and generalized values.
To summarize, this third camp of critics urges us to broaden our view of what is
relevant political and social participation. The critique maintains that we might have
missed recent developments in forms of participation that are not easily observed,

57
Ackelsberg, Martha, ‘Broadening the Study of Women’s Participation,’ in Susan Carroll, ed., Women
and American Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 214-236.
58
Dekker, Paul and Ric Uslaner, eds., Social Capital and Everyday Life (London: Routledge, 2001).
59
Mutz, Diana and Jeffrey Mondak, ‘Democracy at Work. Contributions of the Workplace Toward a
Public Sphere,’ Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association,
Chicago, April 23-25 1998.
60
Newton, Kenneth, ‘Social Capital and Democracy in Modern Europe,’ in Jan van Deth et al., eds., Social
Capital and European Democracy (London: Routledge 1999), pp. 2-24.
61
Lowndes, Vivien, ‘Women and Social Capital: A Comment on Hall’s ‘Social Capital in Britain,’’ British
Journal of Political Science, 30(3) (2000), 533-537.
62
Ferree, Myra M. and Patricia Martin, eds., Feminist Organizations (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1995).
counted or measured. These forms of participation are more fluid, sporadic and less
organized, and consequently they will be much harder to detect accurately in survey
research. In addition, we might have looked in the wrong places all along, because many
individuals, (and women in particular,) have been regularly involved in unobserved social
interactions that have wider societal consequences.

‘So what?’

The fourth argument against communitarian pessimism is the most fundamental,

and, from a theoretical point of view, also the most interesting. These authors accept the
data substantiating the decline thesis, but dispute the normative consequences that have
been attributed to it by communitarian scholars. Namely, they claim that a decline in
participation and face-to-face interaction does not necessarily have negative effects for
social or political stability and democracy overall. Though it is possible that formal
participation mechanisms and traditional political organizations were necessary during
the development phase of mass democracies, within contemporary societies they have
lost much of their relevance. These authors argue that the decline of trust in government
and in politics should not be seen as a threat to political stability, but rather as an
indication of the fact that these systems have reached adulthood, and have therefore
learned to live with the scrutiny of critical citizens.63 Inglehart summarizes this point of
view succinctly in his title: ‘Postmodernization erodes respect for authority, but increases
support for democracy.’64

The data indeed show that younger age cohorts, who Putnam views as the partial
‘culprit’ for the overall decline of civic participation, are also most strongly attached to
democratic values. Especially in Inglehart’s work, the decline of traditional political
integration is conceptualized as part of a global and structural transformation of value
patterns in western societies; there has been, he claims, a move away from survival
values like obedience and trust in hierarchies and towards more self-expressive and post-
materialist values such as tolerance, freedom and individual fulfilment. Support for
freedom of expression, in addition to tolerance for ethnic or sexual minorities is found to
be stronger and more widespread among the younger age cohorts, and not the members
of the ‘long civic generation.’ In sum, in Inglehart’s view, younger cohorts
understandably develop distrust in traditional political and hierarchical institutions.
However, their deep belief in democracy, as well as their political actions (such as protest
actions and new modes of organizations) makes those generations democratic in a new
way.

63
Inglehart, Modernization and Postmodernization; Welzel, Chris, Ronald Inglehart and Hans-Dieter
Klingemann. ‘The Theory of Human Development,’ European Journal of Political Research, 42(2) (2003),
341-380; Norris, ed., Critical Citizens; Norris, Democratic Phoenix.
64
Inglehart, Ronald, ‘Postmodernization Erodes Respect for Authority, but Increases Support for
Democracy,’ in Pippa Norris, ed., Critical Citizens. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 236-256.
 The value pattern described by Inglehart therefore is perfectly compatible with
what Schudson has labelled the ‘monitoring citizen.’65 This concept of citizenship
suggests that most people will not be involved in politics as a day-to-day routine. Rather
they monitor the political system from a distance, relying heavily on the information
provided by the mass media. The act of monitoring does not threaten the feeling of
political efficacy, as citizens do and will participate and exert pressure on governments or
other political actors if and when the need arises. Conventional forms of political
participation therefore lose their routine character, but this does not imply that citizens
lose their ability to influence political decision-making. In this view, declining levels of
participation should not cause any concern about the future viability of democratic
systems, as they are merely reflecting a transition from routine participation to a more
reflexive and monitoring form of political involvement.

A Research Agenda

What are the implications of these four counter-positions to the Bowling Alone
thesis? Do we arrive at any definite answers if we accumulate their insights? Ironically, at
first sight the various arguments seem to contradict each other; some critics vehemently
question the evidence pointing to a decline, whereas others accept it but perceive
different consequences. As yet, hard-nosed empirical evidence is scarce and many causal
relationships are still left unexplored. Each of these four avenues of criticism opens a
research agenda that should demonstrate how we can get closer to a definite answer about
whether social capital and civic engagement are declining or just transforming, and about
the consequences of this evolution.

The first argument, which patently denies that a decline is in fact taking place,
calls for the continuation and replication of already existing time-series. Following
research by Theda Skocpol,66 we might also think about ways to incorporate historical
evidence in the debate in order to establish a clear picture of the actual civic behaviour of
previous generations. While for most survey-oriented political scientists the world seems
to have been created in 1948, at the advent of the National Elections Studies, historical
material allows us to build longer time-series. In this way, the changes we have witnessed
during the past four decades can be put into historical perspective. The 1960s were
indeed an era of unprecedented civic activism that involved neighbourhood engagement
and memberships of various political and non-political associations, which might imply
that the current decline stands for a return to ‘normal’ levels of participation.

The second argument leaves us with a difficult task: outside the US, few long-
term and reliable time-series are available. True, voter turnout, party, and union
memberships are well-documented, but most informal forms of social interaction are not.

65
Schudson, Michael, The Good Citizen (New York: Free Press, 1998).
66
Skocpol, Theda, ‘How Americans Became Civic,’ in Theda Skocpol and Morris Fiorina, eds., Civic
Engagement in American Democracy (Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1999), pp. 27-80; Skocpol,
Diminished Democracy. From Membership to Management in American Civic Life.
However, from the first and second critiques it is clear that not all social capital indicators
evolve simultaneously, and maybe not even in the same direction. The available
evidence, therefore, should not be used to espouse a universal model of longitudinal
social and political involvement. Clearly, developments of political trust do not directly
translate into insights in time-patterns of generalised trust. Similarly, the fact that social
interaction patterns seem to change in the United States should not be used for
predictions of this evolution in other Western societies. Various research efforts are now
under way in Western Europe to establish social capital benchmark studies, but long-term
results, by their very nature, emerge only slowly. In the meantime, national longitudinal
surveys and local over-time comparisons, as well as unexplored data sources, can be
exploited for the analysis of national or even regional trends.

The third counter-hypothesis to the decline thesis calls for the development of new
survey questions and instruments that adequately measure the occurrence and the
magnitude of new forms of political and social participation. Politicized life-style
elements such as forms of political consumerism, political or ethical dress codes, online
political chat-rooms, etcetera, should be taken into account in this kind of research. A
number of case studies demonstrate that these new participation forms are indeed making
an appearance, but this approach does not inform us about their overall prevalence, or
about the extent to which these findings can be generalized. As Offe and Fuchs (2002,
243) observe: ‘There is a remarkable lack of data on the less formal types of associative
activity.’67

Clearly, taking the third counter-argument seriously implies the necessity of moving
from case studies towards the use of cross-national survey data, a step which has not been
taken thus far.68 Inevitably, these new forms of citizens’ involvement will be difficult to
measure because of their fluid, spontaneous, and unstructured character.69 The
development of new survey instruments is again an essential prerequisite towards
determining what these new forms of participation mean in an individual’s life, and
whether or not they take on a political character. How can we distinguish privately
motivated acts without wider societal consequences from acts that are intended to have,
or may have, a political meaning? To what extent can private motivation serve as a
mobilizing force for public or societal acts? These kinds of questions will have to be
addressed in any future survey research on political involvement that takes life-style
politics into consideration.

67
Offe, Claus and Susanne Fuchs, ‘A Decline of Social Capital? The German Case,’ in Robert Putnam, ed.,
Democracies in Flux (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 189-243, p. 243.
68
However, see: Goul Andersen, Jørgen and Mette Tobiasen, Politisk forbrug og politiske forbrugere.
Globalisering og politik i hverdagslivet (Aarhus: Magtudredningen, 2001); Goul Andersen, Jørgen and
Mette Tobiasen, ‘Who are These Political Consumers Anyway? Survey Evidence from Denmark’ in
Micheletti, Føllesdal and Stolle, eds., Politics, Products, and Markets (New Brunswick: Transaction Press,
2004), pp. 203-222; Stolle, Dietlind, Marc Hooghe and Michelle Micheletti, ‘Political Consumerism – A
New Phenomenon of Political Participation? An Exploratory Study in Canada, Belgium and Sweden.’
Paper presented at the ECPR Joint Sessions in Edinburgh, March 28-April 2, 2003.
69
Beck, Ulrich and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, Individualization. Institutionalized Individualism and its
Social and Political Consequences (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2002), p. 19.
 Let us clarify this point with an example. Over the past decades a flourishing
commercially-organized gay subculture has emerged in metropolitan areas such as San
Francisco, London and Amsterdam. Gay and lesbian magazines, shops and travel
agencies are an important constitutive element of this culture. However, while some
authors consider these commercial ventures as a public and even politically inspired
manifestation of gay and lesbian identity, for others it is just a form of individual
consumer preference, without any political consequences.70 To determine whether such
forms of interaction can still be seen as manifestations of civic engagement, it is essential
to know the both the intention and the motivations of the actor involved. For example,
booking an occasional trip with a gay travel agency because it costs less could not be
defined as political participation, whereas deliberately doing so to support the gay and
lesbian movements could be considered as a political act which has wider societal
consequences. In sum, the motivation and regularity of the new political acts should be
included in our attempts to measure these forms of involvement.

While the previous three counter-arguments presented against the decline thesis
confronted us with the need for better and richer survey and other data, the fourth
challenge goes a step further. It is by now well established that younger and better-
educated age cohorts indeed adhere to a more postmodern value pattern; they are more
critical with regard to authority and institutions, but they strongly support democratic
values.71 Therefore it seems safe to conclude that traditional associations and
participatory mechanisms are not irreplaceable with regard to their socialization function;
democratic value patterns can be established and maintained, even without formal
memberships with voluntary associations or political parties. In other words, one of the
worries of communitarians can be soothed, in that the internal function of voluntary
associations and other types of organisations can be replaced by other socialization
agents.

There are fewer indications, however, that a functional equivalent might exist for
the external function of intermediary associations. The fourth argument, therefore, leads
us to suggest further research at the macro level, and a re-invigoration of the old
governability debate.72 Young age cohorts might be ‘critical citizens,’73 yet the question
has not been addressed as to whether democratic political systems are able to function
when faced with large numbers of such citizens. Political systems depend on routine and
diffuse forms of support, and we cannot be certain whether the better-informed citizens of
today and tomorrow will actually provide this kind of support. Furthermore, traditional
intermediary organizations like trade unions or political parties, which are losing
members in most Western societies, have historically been highly effective instruments
70
Adam, Barry, Jan Willem Duyvendak and André Krouwel, eds., The Global Emergence of Gay and
Lesbian Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999).
71
Inglehart, Modernization and Postmodernization.
72
Crozier, Michael, Samuel Huntington and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy (New York: New
York University Press, 1975).
73
Norris, ed., Critical Citizens. Global Support for Democratic Government.
both in aggregating interests of voters and members, and in introducing these interests
into the political decision making process.74 Whether new forms of participation
preferred by younger age cohorts are just as effective in fulfilling this instrumental
function has yet to be examined in depth. Although various examples of new forms of
political and social involvement demonstrate their success, it is still open for debate as to
whether these new action repertoires enable citizens to influence political decision-
making efficiently. Political systems might fall below the threshold of ‘democracy,’ if the
collective pressures of citizens on decision-making are exerted only sporadically and
without a stable organizational force. One of the main problems in this respect is that
within parliamentary democracies, decision-making is inevitably a long-term process,
one that respects extensive procedural and consultative mechanisms. If mobilization
campaigns become short-lived events, their impact could be dampened before any really
changes are brought about. How are long-term institutionalized decision-making
processes affected given the absence of an ingrained organizational structure that
aggregates citizens’ opinion? That question has not even been addressed by most authors
writing about postmodernization.

74
Baumgartner, Frank and Beth Leech, Basic Interests (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
ECPR Joint Sessions 2004 in Uppsala

Dietlind Stolle, McGill University

Marc Hooghe, University of Leuven

PART 2:
WORK IN PROGRESS
AN EMPIRICAL EXPLORATION OF NEW FORMS OF
PARTICIPATION
WHAT CHANGED BETWEEN 1974 AND 2002?

In this empirical exploration and in light of our workshop theme, we will focus on the
claims of the four camps that vehemently oppose the decline thesis. 75 First, we need to
establish whether the decline of conventional politics is also present in Europe. We
therefore examine whether and how participation patterns have changed over the last
decades using comparative data from the last three decades. Second, we need to explore
whether new forms of participation are rising and whether they have the potential to
substitute for the lack of traditional political involvement. What is involved in this
transformation, who is participating in these new rising forms of participation, how do
they influence the actual process of participation? Third, we need to test whether those
engaged in new forms of participation are also those most critical and alienated from the
established political world as the scholars in this ‘postmodern’ camp would have it.
Data

Since no one data set can answer all of these questions, we will have to rely on several data sources that are
currently available. Our data sources include:
- The Political Action dataset, that was collected in eight nations in the early 1970s (see the paper
by Samuel Barnes). In our analysis we only use the 7 European nations, not the US data76.
- The various waves of the World Values Surveys (1980/1990/1995-97/1999-2000)77.
- The results from the 1st European Social Survey (ESS), conducted in 2002 in 21 European
countries (including Israel)78.

American Exceptionalism: Some Longitudinal Evidence

In our attempt to cover as long of a time span as possible, the comparison between the Political Action data
set from the early 1970s, the World Value Survey and the most recent ESS in 2002 seem most plausible.
For a number of countries, and for a number of participation acts this comparison is indeed possible,
although extreme care should be taken, since sampling procedures, and the wording of various items have
changed since the early 1970s. The figures reported in Table 1, therefore, should only be taken to indicate a
general trend, not as a precise measurement.

75
. See part 1 of this paper. We will not address the arguments of the first camp for reasons of time and
space.
76
. For a full description of the Political Action data, see Barnes & Kaase (1979), pp. 537-591. Fieldwork
for this survey was done in 1973-1975, with most interviews being conducted in 1974.
77
. For a full description of the data set, see www.worldvaluessurvey.org.
78
. For a full description of the ESS data, see www.europeansocialsurvey.org.
Table 1: Frequency of political acts, 1974-2002
Country 1974 1981 1990 1995/97 1999/00 trend in 2002
WVS WVS WVS WVS WVS
Germany*
- signed a petition 30.5 47.4 57.0 65.9 47.0 Rise** 29.1
- boycott 43 7.5 10.4 18.1 10.2 Rise** 28.1
- demonstration 8.5 14.7 21.0 25.7 21.7 Rise** 10.6
- occupy buildings 0.2 1.5 1.1 2.3 0.8 Stable --
- contact politician 27.4 -- -- -- -- 12.7
- worked for party 20.8 -- -- -- -- 4.0
- member of party*** 5.7 8.1 7.6 8.6 3.1 Decline 3.6
Great Britain
- signed a petition 22.2 63.3 75.3 57.6 80.7 Rise** 40.6
- boycott 5.3 7.2 13.8 -- 16.6 Rise 16.1
- demonstration 5.6 6.9 10.0 -- 13.3 Rise** 4.4
- occupy buildings 0.8 2.5 2.4 -- 2.1 Stable --
- contact politician 23.8 -- -- -- -- 18.4
- worked for party 7.7 -- -- -- -- 4.5
- member of party 4.4 4.6 5.0 -- 2.6 Decline 2.8
Netherlands
- signed a petition 20.9 35.1 50.9 -- 61.4 Rise** 22,5
- boycott 5.2 6.5 8.5 -- 21.9 Rise** 10,4
- demonstration 7.0 12.6 25.3 -- 32.3 Rise** 2,9
-occupy buildings 1.5 2.4 3.2 -- 5.4 Rise --
- contact politician 26.9 -- -- -- -- 14,4
- worked for party 8.8 -- -- -- -- 3,4
- member of party 5.0 7.6 10.1 -- 9.3 Stable** 4,8
Austria
- signed a petition 34.2 -- -- -- -- 27,3
- boycott 2.1 -- -- -- -- 21,6
- demonstration 6.2 -- -- -- -- 9,6
- contact politician 27.8 -- -- -- -- 18,5
- worked for party 12.2 -- -- -- -- 10,3
- member of party 15.6 -- -- -- -- 14,0
Italy
- signed a petition 9.9 42.1 48.1 -- 54.6 Rise** 17,4
- boycott 0.8 6.0 10.9 -- 10.3 Rise** 7,6
- demonstration 16.7 26.7 36.0 -- 34.8 Rise** 11,0
-occupy buildings 4.3 5.8 7.6 -- 8.0 Rise --
- contact politician 28.8 -- -- -- -- 12,0
- worked for party 12.6 -- -- -- -- 3,0
- member of party 5.6 6.4 5.3 -- 4.1 Decline 3,9
Switzerland
- signed a petition 44.3 -- 63.3 68.0 -- Rise** 39,3
- boycott 4.4 -- -- -- -- Rise 31,4
- demonstration 8.0 -- 16.0 17.3 -- Rise** 7,9
- contact politician 33.3 -- -- -- -- 17,4
- worked for party 23.6 -- -- -- -- 7,8
- member of party 6.7 -- 9.0 16.9 -- Rise** 8,8
Finland
- signed a petition 18.7 29.8 -- 39.2 50.8 Rise** 24,0
- boycott 1.1 8.5 -- 12.2 15.2 Rise 26,7
- demonstration 5.7 14.4 -- 12.8 14.8 Rise** 1,9
- occupy buildings 0.0 0.7 0.5 0.1 Decline --
- contact politician 26.7 -- -- -- 24,3
- worked for party 12.4 -- -- -- 3,6
- member of party 7.9 3.2 9.8 6.1 Stable 7,4
Entries are percentages of respondents indicating that they have participated in these acts. Source: Political Action survey;
1981/1990/1995/97 and 1999/00 World Values Surveys; 2002: European Social Survey. In the Political Action survey as well as in the
WVS usually no time frame was included, in the ESS the question was asked about the previous 12 months.
* For all data points only figures from (the former) West Germany were included.
 ** Trend was slightly reversed for last data point.
*** Party membership was asked nearly identically in the Political Action and the ESS surveys, however, the
WVS asks about membership in political parties and groups.

This comparison across three decades already gives us some indication regarding the decline debate, but
again, caution is to be advised. We cannot directly compare the percentages of the previous surveys and the
ESS, because the question wording was restricted to activities done in the last 12 months in the ESS, but
not in the Political Action and WVS data. Such a comparison would underestimate a rise in activities and
overestimate a decline. In addition, activities that are reported by only a small group of the population, such
as party membership are to be taken with most caution. E.g., in most countries there is only a moderate
decline in the number of respondents reporting their party membership. The comparison is made even more
difficult since the WVS has included political parties and organizations into its question. From actual
membership records, however, we know that this decline has been steeper, as political parties in most
Western European countries have been losing members rapidly (Mair & van Biezen 2000). If we compare
the trend from the survey results, with Mair and van Biezen’s actual membership figures, we observe that
in several countries the survey results reflect the basic downward trend, but that this trend is usually
underestimated (except in Germany).

Table 2: Party Membership Trends

Country Survey trend (1974-2002) Actual Membership (1980-2000)
Germany -37 % -9%
Great Britain - 37 % - 50 %
Netherlands -4% - 32 %
Austria - 10 % - 30 %
Italy - 30 % - 51 %
Switzerland +31 % - 29 %
Finland -6% - 34 %
Source: Survey trend: our comparison between Political Action and ESS in which the same membership
question has been asked; Membership: Mair & van Biezen (2000)

The only outlier is Switzerland, where survey figures suggest that there has been a rise in party
membership. However, there is some reason to be cautious about these findings. Switzerland had one of the
lowest response rates in the entire ESS sample, which makes us believe that this resulted in a rather
selective sample of Swiss respondents79.

However, Table 1 shows a clear general trend. Relatively new forms of participation that were surveyed
such as signing petitions, boycotts, and demonstrations show overall upward trends. There is not one
country included that shows a downward trend in these kinds of acts. The wording of the questions is
largely the same in the Political Action and WVS surveys 80 as it did not include any time reference, so we
could assume that even a distant experience with e.g. boycotting might lead to a positive answer. In 2002
the question was stricter: “During the last 12 months, have you (…) boycotted certain products”? But even
despite the fact that the wording of the question has become more restrictive, there is an impressive rise in
the number of positive answers when we compare the results of the Political Action survey and the ESS.

The trend is less stable when we compare the so-called unconventional activities, in this case, the
occupation of buildings. Clearly, this radical activity does not follow a general pattern across countries, and
in general the frequency of this act is so low, that a general population survey does not seem an appropriate
instrument to analyse this kind of participation. In some countries, such as Italy or the Netherlands,
occupying buildings is increasing over time, whereas fewer people use this form of engagement in

79
. The goal of the ESS was to reach a response rate of 70 per cent in every participating country.
Switzerland, however, only obtained a response rate of 33.5 per cent (!), by far the lowest rate of all 21
countries.
80
In 1974 the exact question was: “Are you willing to join boycotts”, with a first answer category: “I have
done this”. All the other answering possibilities ventured into the possibility that the respondent might ever
consider taking part in this kind of action.
Germany or Finland. Overall, such radical activities have not been adopted as regular forms of involvement
over the last decades. Reading back Political Action, it seems clear that in the 1970s the expectation was
that this kind of radical action repertoire would spread out through the population, but clearly this has not
happened. The innovation in the action repertoire of ordinary citizens since the 1970s is not dominated by
radical or even openly confrontational acts, but rather by less radical acts like signing a petition, or buying
‘the right’ products.

Nevertheless, Table 1 confirms the notion that there is reason to believe that conventional forms of
participation have declined. The critics who argue that Europe might be exempt from this process are not
necessarily correct: for a number of acts, we observe a clear negative trend in European countries, too.
However, the critics of the decline thesis who suggest that new forms of participation have increased over
time seem to have a point. This is particularly true for boycotts, signing petitions and demonstrations. We
might expect that this trend might also hold for other unmeasured activities, such as buying products for
political reasons or more recently joining online internet campaigns, forwarding political messages etc.
which are currently blossoming and for which we do not have any survey measurements. The point is that
we do not have any longitudinal data on several forms of political involvement, many of which will be
dealt with in our workshop this week. Overall, we did not only learn that certain forms of participation are
on the rise, but that some of them such as boycotts and petitions are also much more wide-spread than
many conventional forms (with the exception of voting, which has always enjoyed a distinct status in
participation research). This emerging transformation of political action repertoires might have
consequences with regard to the question who participates in them.

In the remainder of this paper, we will address two questions:

- are these new forms of participation inclusive, i.e., are they being practised by various segments of
the population?
- are they, as some authors have argued, the expression of a distrustful and alienated outlook toward
the political system?

Voice and Equality--Shifting Inclusion?

It is plausible that the steady increase of the number of people involved in these ways of engagements
might have also changed the make-up of those who participate. To what extent is the rise of new types of
engagement linked to a wider distribution of participation, reducing the all too visible inequalities that
participation usually brings about (Verba 2003). At least three scenarios are feasible. First, new forms of
participation might just engage more of the same kind of people: more educated citizens, male citizens, and
those with more resources and civic skills overall. Second, new forms of participation in fact might
increase the inequalities found in participation research, as these forms might require more resources and
thereby involve a homogeneous part of the population that has a substantial amount of resources available.
Or third, these forms might reach beyond the usual clientele of participants thereby reducing the existing
inequalities. The hypothesis in part of the literature is that this last scenario is most likely because we
assume that new forms of participation are less time-consuming, more sporadic, less organized and unlike
party organizations or unions they are embedded in a less hierarchical structure therefore might attract a
broader group of citizens, including the young generations and women.

One obvious group that is mobilized through these new forms of participation are women. If we look for
example at boycotts, while in the 1970s this was still a predominantly male activity, throughout the decades
we see that in 10 out of 16 West European countries included in the World Value survey, the gender gap
for boycotting decreased steadily and was even reversed in some Scandinavian countries. In the 2002 ESS
survey, we find in 9 out of 21 countries a reversed gender gap for boycotts. For the usually unmeasured
activity of “buycotting” (i.e., deliberately buying products for ethical or political reasons), we find an even
stronger reversal: in all countries but Spain do we find more women involved in buycotting than men 81. For

81
. A counterargument could be that in general women are more often responsible for shopping, so they
have more opportunities to participate in this kind of action. This might be true, however, in a pilot survey
among 1,015 students in Sweden, Belgium and Canada, we showed that there is no relation between the
the comparison in Figure 1 between gender inequalities in boycotts we used the data from 1974 (Political
Action) and 2002 (ESS). Clearly, political consumerism has become a well-integrated part of women’s
political action repertoires. Not only are more citizens overall involved in this activity, but there are
selected forms of engagement that draw disproportionally more women into it than men. In other words,
the rise in these new forms of participation has affected more women than men (see also Stolle and
Micheletti forthcoming).

men
40 women
35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0

Figure 1: Participation in boycott actions, Political Action (ca. 1974) and ESS (2002)

This ‘feminization’ of boycott actions can be seen as part of a larger social trend. It is quite striking to
observe that the actions that are on the rise or have remained stable between 1974 and 2002 are gender-
neutral, and at least with regard to political consumerism, are actually being practised more by women now.
As Figure 2 demonstrates, the acts of signing petitions, boycotting and demonstrations started out with the
typical gender gap in the 1970’s, but by now the gender gap has been either reversed, overcome or
declined.

propensity to participate in this form of action and the frequency of shopping (Stolle, Hooghe & Micheletti
2004).
Figure 2: Gender distribution of all political acts 1974 and 2002

For acts that clearly show a downward trend (party membership, contacting a politician etc.), on the other
hand, the traditional gender gap remains present, and does not even show a visible sign of being reduced.
For example, party membership and contacting politicians not only decline in the general population, but
they also remain predominantly male activities. Voting is a special case, as the gender gap here has been
overcome already in the 1970’s at least in the selected European countries, and this remains unchanged in
200282.

This preliminary analysis shows that some new forms of participation mobilize and include groups of the
population (in this case women) that have been previously excluded altogether, or at least included in an
unbalanced way. At first sight, there is therefore a good potential of these types of participation to
overcome the widespread inequalities in political participation. At this moment in research, we cannot go
much further than observing that politics is changing because of the introduction of participation forms that
are ultimately preferred by women. Political scientists should acknowledge this trend. Whether normatively
speaking this transformation will lead toward more democratisation is still an open question. We know
from the traditional “male”, partisan acts, that they can be highly effective to get one’s views across to
political decision makers. There is indeed a clear danger that these new acts are located mostly outside the
traditional political arena. Given that they are usually low-cost involvements outside the system, perhaps
they are less effective than the traditional forms. So in a way, some scholars might still worry that this
transformation might actually weaken the impact citizens have on the political system. To them,
participating in a boycott action is a case in point: it might be an inclusive way to practice politics (at least
with regard to gender), but it is targeted mostly at companies and it therefore might leave politicians off the
hook. Putnam (2002, 394) at least is concerned about “the possibility that the rising forms of civic
participation might be less suited to the pursuit of collective goods than the forms they are replacing”.

82
. The fact that these surveys do not depict a clear downward trend with regard to voting is especially
troublesome, since the figures show that indeed fewer citizens participate in elections (Blais, Gidengil &
Nevitte 2004). This means that surveys underestimate this trend, and the fact that response rates tend to fall
could be partly responsible for this loss of quality: it is reasonable to assume that those who do not vote are
less likely to participate in surveys.
Given the available evidence in our data, however, we cannot make any definitive statements on that
possibility but we hope to discuss these themes when we look at some case-studies in the workshop.

Increasing equality?

With regard to one very basic and ubiquitous form of inequality, we can observe some progress. As shown,
women are strongly involved in these new forms of participation, sometimes even outnumbering men. This
was not yet the case back in the early 1970s, when women were still a minority for each and every form of
activism. How has inclusiveness changed for dimensions of age and education?

Figure 3: Participation ratios in six forms of political engagement, for 3 education categories.

Our first comparison beyond gender is on education. The graph demonstrates that education has a
tremendous influence on who the participants are throughout nearly all forms of participation in the
1970’s. This is particularly true for protest politics--back then one of the newest form of participation.
Citizens in the highest educational group were five times as likely to participate in protests than
citizens with the lowest education. Also boycotting already showed significant signs of inequality then.
In 2002 the picture is not much different: education still divides the participants and non-participants,
also among the new forms. The new forms do not help to diminish the inequalities in terms of
education. In fact the exclusive influence of education is strongest for political consumerism. Citizens
in the highest educational group are 3.5 times as likely to engage in this form of action than those with
lowest educational resources.
The only exception to this is that in the 1970s apparently voting was more widespread among those
with little formal education. Looking at the countries separately shows that this trend was strongest in
Great Britain and in Finland, two countries with strong working-class based parties. Apparently the
effort by these parties to mobilise votes, resulted in a rather egalitarian distribution of participation in
elections.

In sum, new forms of participation do not diminish the inequalities between participants regarding
educational resources. The following comparison regards the ability of participation forms to include
citizens from different age ranges. It is particularly important to understand which forms discriminate
against younger and/or older people. Given our previous discussions we would expect that young
citizens are more drawn toward new forms of participation, whereas we would expect older citizens to
engage in traditional forms.

90
80
70
60
50
15-30
40
30 31-45
20 46-60
10 61+
0

Figure 4: Participation according to age group, Political Action 1974. For voting: age above 21.
Figure 5: European Social Survey, 2002. For voting, age above 18.

In this regard the pattern has clearly changed. Back in the early 1970s the youngest age groups were often
the ones experimenting with new forms of political participation, especially for boycotts, petitions and
demonstrations. The pattern is less visible in the 2002 data. Young people still demonstrate more often than
others, but with regard to political consumerism and the signing of petitions, the middle age group now has
taken the lead. One interpretation of these findings is that we perhaps witness the ageing of the ‘protest
generation’ (Jennings 1987). Those who initialized demonstrations, petitions and boycotts at the time are
also those who continue to do it today but their habit is maybe not picked up as strongly by younger age
cohorts. Even two additional interpretations are feasible here: a) young people are indeed disaffected and
overall participate less often, or b), young citizens engage in other forms of participation—and for them
demonstrations, boycotts and petitions are perhaps already outdated. They might engage in those political
acts that we rarely measure, such as internet campaigns, culture jamming, forwarding of e-mails, etc.

Overall, we have found some evidence against the second camp of critics of the decline thesis who argue
that this is a phenomenon unique to the United States or North America. The analysis of selected European
countries so far has shown that also in Europe certain traditional political activities are dwindling over time,
particularly party membership, and there is some evidence that contacting a politician and working for a
party are also down. We also found that the third camp of critics in the decline debacle has a point:
although some traditional forms of participation are in decline, new forms have become more wide-spread
within the populations of selected European countries. Moreover, they have partially integrated formerly
excluded groups such as women, but they remain exclusive for the poor and uneducated and they are not as
frequently practiced by the very young generations either.

Alienated or integrated?

The fourth camp of critics goes a step further—not only do they claim that new individualized action
repertoires are on the rise, but they also state that they are a result of an overall societal change toward
more postmaterialist values. New action repertoires will become wide-spread because citizens distrust
hierarchical institutions and the participation in them. If this was true, we should not only see a rise of new
action repertoires, and the rise of political distrust, but we should also see that those adopting new forms of
engagement also let go of traditional politics. Are the activists of the new forms also those who least likely
perform other traditional kinds of acts? Barnes et al (1979) found that this is not the case, but perhaps the
last 25 years have further contributed to the political alienation of those who like to play politics from an
outside perspective.

Figure 6: Full ESS data set 2002.

Clearly, both graphs indicate the opposite: those active in new forms are also those who engage in
traditional style politics. New action repertoires are being added to existing action repertoires. This
relationship is even more extreme in the case of those who engage in protest politics. In other words, it
seems as if those who engage in new forms of participation are not necessarily those who oppose the
current political structures, or at least they have not completely dropped out of the traditional political
process. In fact, only 1% of the entire ESS sample respondents have only engaged in new forms of
participation while at the same time avoiding all forms of conventional engagement including voting. And
only 3.5% of the sample has engaged in new forms but nothing traditional except voting. This evidence
does not fare well with the claims of the postmodern camp.
Figure 7: Full ESS data set 2002.

A First Multivariate Test

Thus far, we have been looking at various indicators one by one: gender, age, education, and conventional
participation. These bivariate explorations are useful for indicating trends of inequality. Yet we need to
explore whether these relationships hold in a multivariate model as well.

Since we like to determine the significant changes between 1974 and 2002, we had to limit ourselves to
acts that were measured the same way in the two surveys. For both data sets we therefore work with three
preliminary models explaining:
I) new participation acts (petition and boycott measured as a dichotomous variable)
II) conventional participation acts (contacting politician and party membership, ibid)
III) new participation acts, with conventional acts included as control variables
In the third model, we do not wish to imply a causal structure between conventional and unconventional
acts, but this model allows us to test whether and how these forms are related.

Because we deal with a dichotomous dependent variable, we used a binary logistic regression as our
method of analysis. We also included political interest as a control variable and income as another
demographic measurement.83

When reading Tables 3 and 4, again our main focus of attention is not the absolute level of the relations
(since this is only a very thin model), but rather the comparison between the effects in 1974 and those in
2002.

Table 3: Participation in 1974

Model I Model II Model III
Petition and boycott Contact and party New forms controlled

83
. Tests revealed no multicollinearity between any of the independent variables including education and
income.
 membership for traditional
Cte. -.431 (.189) 1.262 (.202) -.279 (.193)
Gender -.234 (.059)*** -.845 (.062)*** -.134 (.060)*
Education level .230 (.025)*** .164 (.027)*** .215 (.025)***
Income level *** *** **
-1 lowest -.349 (.081) -.398 (.087) -.298 (.082)
-2 -.165 (.068) -.239 (.072) -.131 (.068)
-3 highest ref. ref. ref.
Age *** *** ***
-15-30 .432 (.095) -.001 (.102) .448 (.096)
-31-45 .425 (.092) .283 (.097) .397 (.093)
-46-60 .274 (.093) .297 (.097) .236 (.094)
-61+ ref. ref. ref.
Political Interest .346 (.033)*** .718 (.037)*** .266 (.034)
Conventional -- -- .625 (.065)***
Nagelkerke’s r2 .11 .23 .13
Source: 1974 Political Action, 5 European countries (without Italy and Finland 84)
Entries are results from a binary logistic regression, B and (SE) ***:<.001, **:<.01; *:<.05

Table 4: Participation in 2002

Model I Model II Model III
Petition and boycott Contact and party New forms controlled
membership for traditional
Cte. -.686 (.112) -.651 (.144) -.957 (.115)
Gender .305 (.037)*** -.139 (.047)*** .329 (.037)***
Education level .196 (.017)*** .221 (.021)*** .171 (.017)***
Income level *** *** ***
-1 -.248 (.061) -.144 (.082) -.234 (.062)
-2 -.112 (.058) .079 (.080) -.122 (.059)
-3 ref. ref. ref.
Age *** *** ***
-15-30 .474 (.057) -.791 (.083) .565 (.058)
-31-45 .507 (.052) -.199 (.064) .552 (.052)
-46-60 .426 (.053) .044 (.064) .434 (.054)
-61+ ref. ref. ref.
Political Interest .492 (.023)*** .576 (.032)*** .437 (.024)***
Conventional -- -- .854 (.050)***
Nagelkerke’s r2 .10 .12 .13
ESS, 2002. Binary logistic regression. Same five countries as in 1974.

The most obvious conclusion to be drawn from a comparison between the 1974 and the 2002 logistic
regression is that most of the relations we observed in our bivariate exploration do seem to hold, even when
building a slim multivariate model. We therefore can be more confident about the validity of our
observations:

1. Inequalities with regard to gender have been reduced substantially. This is true for conventional, party-
related acts, although the gender gap is still present there. With regard to the two new forms, the gender gap
has even been reversed, with women more active in boycotts and petitions.
2. Inequality with regard to education remains firmly in place, and there is no indication that this form of
inequality is being weakened. Education is highly significant both for conventional and what we call new
acts, and this is true both in 1974 and in 2002. So no progress toward more equality on that account at all.
3. With regard to income, inequalities are persistent for new acts.

84
. Italy and Finland were excluded from this analysis because income was measured differently, and in a
non-comparable manner, than in the other five European countries.
4. With regard to age, it is striking to observe that the youngest age group withdraws from party life more
strongly than was the case in 1974. It seems clear that political parties have a problem in reaching young
people. With regard to new actions, the 46-60 age group is clearly more active than in 1974.
5. The cumulative relation between ‘conventional’ and ‘new’ acts remains just as strong in 2002 as in 1974,
mirroring the conclusions from the Political Action survey.

Does the broadening of participation repertoires lead to a more equal voice in politics? On one account: yes
– gender inequalities have been dramatically reduced in three decades time. All other forms of inequality
(income, education) however, remain firmly in place. Given our current level of analysis, we cannot
determine yet whether these inequalities actually have become more outspoken. It should be remembered,
however, that back in the 1970s, education and income equalities with regard to party politics were already
quite strong, something that is all too often forgotten by authors depicting a rosy picture of the ‘civic
generation’: in the early 1970s party politics was an elite game, and this is something to be taken into
account when discussing the democratic potential of new forms of political engagement. As we all know,
two wrongs don’t make right, but is always good to see things in perspective: the new political action
repertoire is not necessarily more exclusive than the conventional political action repertoire, and in fact ahs
shown more potential for inclusiveness already.

Comparing Sources of Participation

In this last section of our empirical analysis we like to turn to a fuller model of participation acts in order to
better understand their different attitudinal, behavioral and demographic sources. How do various resources
and skills necessary for the engagement in political acts compare to attitudinal resources and political
orientations? How can we distinguish the various types of political acts in terms of the individual level
factors that predict them? Although we already established that new forms of participation require high
education levels as well as income, is it true that their ad-hoc nature and the low time commitment might
demand fewer civic skills of those who engage in them?

Further, many authors in fourth battle camp propose that the new forms of participation draw in citizens
who hold anti-hierarchical values. In fact the argument goes further, citizens are less inclined to participate
in traditional forms of actions because these exhibit hierarchical power structures (e.g. rigid party
organizations). Authors like Inglehart would predict that those who drop out of the traditional engagement
in political systems do so because they are the ones most critical of the standard political institutions
(1997). They would further predict that participants in new forms would not necessarily find the national
level governments legitimate to deal with societal problems. Instead, citizens who engage in new forms of
participation believe more in political institutions beyond one’s own nation state. The objections against
decline in this camp have at least two major empirical implications: first, citizens who engage in new forms
must have anti-hierarchical values and they must be less trusting in traditional political institutions, and
second, they should give more legitimacy to political institutions beyond the nation state. We will put these
hypotheses to the test.

The ESS contains 8 questions for different policy areas for which the respondent is asked to indicate the
preferred level of government. The sample is skewed, most people think that the international level is only
preferred for very few policy issues. We created a variable that measures how many times the international
level or the EU level was indicated.

Although six institutional trust questions (on the parliament, politicians, the legal system, the police, the EU
and UN) loaded well together in a factor analysis, we separated the international institutions and formed a
factor score with trust items for four national level institutions. This step was necessary in order to
distinguish trust in national institutions from trust in international institutions. 85

85
The claim that people lose confidence in national political institutions, but remain hopeful or become
more inclined toward international organizations is not supported.
For values of hierarchy we created a scale of three survey items that seem to measure a preference for
hierarchy.86 The items asked the respondent whether he/she thinks of him/herself as a person who follows
the rules and does what he/she is told, or whether it is important to follow traditions or customs.

We have several measures of civic skills and resources. In the classic literature on political participation,
voluntary organizations play an important role. Verba, Schlozman and Brady have shown that in the United
States at least civic skills are learned particularly in churches, other face-to-face groups and at the
workplace. Putnam claims that voluntary associations might socialize their members into civic values that
are important for political engagement. Yet others argue that associations might display an important
network function which offers mobilization for political acts through one’s lifetime (Hooghe, Stolle and
Stouthysen 2003; Teorell 2003). We therefore included three associational measures: one that measures
membership in interest groups such as unions and professional organizations, one that measures
membership in cultural face-to-face groups such as churches and social groups, as well as membership in
so-called new type of checkbook organizations such as humanitarian groups or peace groups which often
do not bring members together. Furthermore we included a measure of employment status distinguishing
those with a job from those who do not work in order to understand how work and skills connected to
employment might influence political participation. In addition we also included a measure of skills learned
at the job, in our case skills of supervision which might positively influence political involvement. Given
our theoretical discussion, we expect that such resources might be more important for the more time-
consuming and regular traditional involvement types than for new forms of political participation.

At last, it might be interesting to understand whether certain types of participation are favored by different
political camps, and we therefore include a variable that measures left-right self placement of the
respondent.

Finally, we also included several control variables, such as those demographic variables that have been
shown to matter previously, as well as political interest, and since this dataset combines respondents from
older and stable European democracies and recent transition democracies, we also include a dummy
variable that distinguishes these experiences. As previously, we utilize logistic binary regressions for three
types of political acts this time: conventional participation (party membership, political organizational
membership, contacting politicians, donating money), new forms of participation (signing petitions and
political consumerism), and unconventional political acts (participation in demonstrations and illegal
actions).87

The results confirm our earlier analysis regarding gender, age and education. The traditional gender gap is
strongest for conventional acts, and its reversed for new forms such as political consumerism and signing
petitions. Education is always a significant predictor, and that is also true for political interest. And younger
people are significantly more engaged in new and unconventional acts, whereas less (though not
significantly so) in conventional acts.

For all three acts and controlled for various effects, citizens with left-leaning orientations are more involved
in political acts than citizens with right-leaning orientations, although the effect is strongest for
unconventional acts. Our control variable for Eastern Europe reveals interesting results that might be
helpful for the general interpretation of our findings. For new and unconventional acts, citizens in Eastern
Europe are clearly less involved, whereas they are more engaged in conventional politics than citizens in
Western democracies, controlled for various effects. We cannot really conclude anything definitive about
these findings as several interpretations are possible. Forms of political participation might develop
differently with the maturation of democratic practice, such that conventional politics are most important in
the early democratic phases and new forms develop with democratic experiences (or frustrations). Inglehart

86
The items scaled at a Cronbach’s alpha of .60, which is low, but still acceptable.
87
These three dependent variables are the result of a factor analysis of all political acts in the full ESS data
set which revealed three dimensions: conventional, new, and unconventional. The variables have been
coded as dummy variables distinguishing those who have engaged in this political acts form those who
have not.
and Welzel would argue that this process has its roots in economic development and prosperity and
resulting postmaterialist values which lead to a diversification of action repertoires.

Model I Model II Model III

Conventional New forms Unconventional
Participation
Cte. -.781 (.137)*** -1.911 (.138)*** -4.45 (.226)***
Demographic variables
Gender (male=ref.) .202 (.033)*** -.52 (.033)*** .115 (.053)*
Education level .047 (.005)*** .096 (.005)*** .040 (.007)***
Age *** *** ***
-15-30 -.036 (.055) .200 (.052)*** 1.15 (.09)***
-31-45 .041 (.053) .229 (.051)*** .547 (.093)***
-46-60 .17 (.051)*** .219 (.05)*** .588 (.091)***
-61+ ref. ref. ref.
Attitudinal Controls
Left-Right Placement (0=left, -.04 (.008)*** -.062 (008)*** -.189 (.013)***
10=right)
Political Interest .432 (.021)*** .519 (.020)*** .417 (.033)***
Eastern Europe
East=ref. -.142 (.05)** .96 (.05)*** .96 (.10)***
Workplace Civic Skills
Employed? (ref.) -.013 (.04) -.094 (.038)* .227 (.06)***
Supervision skills (ref.) -.326 (.035)*** -.146 (.035)*** .148 (.059)***
Associational Sources
Interest group member (ref.) -.220 (.037)*** -.385 (.036)*** -.143 (.059)*
Social-Cultural groups (ref.) -.624 (.035)*** -.396 (.033)*** -.200 (.055)***
Check book members (ref.) -.764 (.052)*** -.574 (.058)*** -.452 (.072)***
Church Attendance .57 (.011)*** .036 (.011)*** .027 (.019)
Distrust | Hierarchy
Political Trust -.01 (.017) .519 (.020)*** -.205 (.027)***
Anti-hierarchy .013 (.006)* .063 (.006)*** .045 (.009)***
International legitimacy -.009 (.008) .003 (.007) .037 (.012)**
Nagelkerke’s r2 .17 .27 .13
Log Likelihood 23649.846 24654.893 11326.742
Chi square *** *** ***
Table 5: ESS excluding Israel and Slovenia.
Entries are results from a binary logistic regression, B and (SE) ***:<.001, **:<.01; *:<.05
Is it true that new forms of political participation require fewer civic skills and resources because they are
less time-consuming and performed less regularly? This did not turn out to be the case. Conventional acts
and new forms such as political consumerism are more performed by those who have learned supervision
skills at their workplace, whereas employment in itself does not have a strong effect. For unconventional
acts the relationship is reversed as they are more performed by citizens who do not work or who do not
supervise at work. Workplace skills do not transfer well to these kinds of engagements. However, all
participation acts are supported and mobilized by associational memberships of all kinds. The magnitude of
the effect is strongest for conventional political acts: The odds of non-members vis-à-vis members in
cultural groups and check book organizations to participate in traditional politics is only .50. At this stage
of our analysis we are unable to conclude whether this effect is due to civic skills learned in these groups,
socialization or network effects.
Finally, we examine whether citizens who are engaged in new and unconventional politics are also those
who are most distrusting of the national level institutions and of hierarchical structures. Interestingly,
political distrust is a significant factor for unconventional political forms, whereas new forms of
participation are supported by more political trust in national institutions. Given some theorizing about new
politics, this is a surprising finding, as we would have expected that political consumers, for example,
chose to target companies directly because they give less legitimacy to national political institutions. This is
not the case however. They also do not indicate that political decisions should be taken at the international
institutions. Yet, citizens engaged in new and unconventional politics clearly despise hierarchies and have
embraced anti-hierarchical values more than citizens engaged in conventional politics.

In sum, our results show then that only unconventional acts fit into the category of anti-system participation
dominated by those who distrust mainstream political institutions. New forms of participation such as
political consumerism and signing petitions are well integrated into existing political action repertoires and
they are wide-spread and require similar skills and resources as conventional politics. What distinguishes
them from conventional politics is that more people are currently political in this way, and disproportionate
shares of women and young people are drawn in. Furthermore, new as well as unconventional forms of
participation are disproportionally frequented by citizens who despise hierarchical values and structures.
Yet this sentiment does not translate into the fact that these citizens stop engaging in conventional political
ways. In fact there are hardly any citizens who only go for new or unconventional politics. This finding
does question the validity of the claims of the fourth camp of critics Western democracies do not yet shift
their action repertoires completely from conventional style politics to new forms of action.

Concluding Thoughts

Our examination of forms of political participation has revealed some interesting insights. In Western
democracies at least, we can observe a tendency that conventional politics is practiced less over time.
The critics of the second camp in the decline battle do not get it their way when it comes to political
participation: also in Europe this trend is similar to the one observed in North America, particularly
with regard to party membership and most likely contacting politicians.

Yet the third camp is correct, new forms of participation have blossomed over time. They have indeed
taken a different route than unconventional forms which have been practiced mostly by a minority of
people. What we find is that these new forms of participations are practiced by many more people than
conventional politics ever has (besides voting). This process has been accompanied by an emerging
inclusion of women and young citizens into these types of actions. Although some authors claim these
new actions are very different in nature and character, we have not found strong differences in the
factors related to these acts. In fact, new and unconventional political acts require education, political
interest, and associational connectedness as conventional acts.

Not all hypotheses of the fourth critical camp of the decline debate could be confirmed. Although
participants of new and unconventional forms are clearly anti-hierarchical, this anti-pathy has not
resulted in refraining from conventional politics altogether. Furthermore, although many of the
practitioners of new politics target companies directly, they are still trusting in their national level
institutions, more than those who do not engage in new politics. Perhaps, political consumers hope that
political institutions eventually regulate production practices of corporations. This is also the reason
 why new politics is not necessarily connected to a more international outlook on politics (although
unconventional participation is).

Although young people seem more active when compared to the oldest group in our sample, in
comparison to 1974, they certainly are not anymore the forerunners of new forms of participation.
There might be several reasons for this finding: young people might experience delayed life cycle
effects which might prevent them from activism in their much expanded educational phase. It could be
a true generational effect confirming the fears of those who blame the decline on the low engagement
levels of young generations. Or another scenario would be that young generations engage already in
yet other new ways: they might forward political e-mails, join internet chat groups, or engage in
culture jamming. And we social scientists are just too slow in adapting our measurements to this kind
of social change.

Bibliography:
See part 1

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