Repertoires of political participation: Macroeconomic conditions, socioeconomic resources, and participation gaps in Europe

Abstract

The European economic crisis has stimulated a great deal of research linking contextual macroeconomic conditions and political outputs, as conventional and unconventional political participation. Nevertheless, such research has often treated forms of political participation as independent from each other, overlooking how citizens can choose from combinations of political actions to influence politics in contexts with varying levels of macroeconomic performance. This article, instead, focuses on two common forms of participation – voting and protesting – and studies whether engagement in “repertoires” of participation – the “disengaged” (abstaining and not protesting), the “duty-based” (voting and not protesting), the “protest” (abstaining and protesting), and the “all-round” (voting and protesting) repertoires – varies according to countries’ macroeconomic conditions in Europe in 30 countries over time. This article also considers that the effect of macroeconomic conditions on repertoires of participation might depend on citizens’ socioeconomic resources – such as education, employment status, and income – with consequences for participation gaps or inequalities. Using multilevel models and data from seven rounds of the European Social Survey, this article shows that in contexts where macroeconomic conditions are worse, the probability of engaging in the “protest” repertoire increases, while the probability of engaging in the other three repertoires does not depend on the economy. In addition, the article finds that participation gaps narrow in the “disengaged” and “duty-based” repertoires in contexts with poorer macroeconomic performance, while the gaps in the “protest” and “all-round” repertoires do not change across contexts with different economic conditions.

Protest as One Political Act in Individuals’ Participation Repertoires: Latent Class Analysis and Political Participant Types

“…Most research on political behavior has focused on the sociodemographic and attitudinal determinants of various political acts. The study of participatory inequality is one of the defining areas of scholarship on political participation, and this research has found consistent evidence of increased participation among sociodemographically advantaged individuals (Marien et al, 2010;Quaranta, 2018;Schlozman et al, 2018;Schradie, 2018). Research on the normative and attitudinal determinants of different types of participation has also been a mainstay of research on political behavior, beginning with A.…”

Welfare States Matter for Democracy: Income-based Participatory Inequality in Post-WW 2 Western Democracies

“…Similar investigations in Western Europe, however, revealed no comparable gaps in participation forms other than voting (Topf, 1995). Both national and cross-national evidence suggests that such a gap in participation exists most advanced democracies (Gallego, 2008(Gallego, , 2010Hakhverdian, van der Brug, & de Vries, 2011;Quaranta, 2018), despite earlier evidence that it was limited to voting (Topf, 1995). Even more worrying are results that the turnout gap between educational has increased compared to its levels in the 1950s and 60s (Armingeon & Schädel, 2015;Dassonneville & Hooghe, 2017;Fraga, 2018).…”

Health and political efficacy in context: What is the role of the welfare state?

“…Since we are dealing with a limited number of countries (21), we refrain from adding additional context-level controls to the models to keep them as parsimonious as possible. As a robustness check, we additionally estimate all models with a fixed-effects approach, as there are arguably further confounding country-specific factors not captured by the regime and policy variables (Quaranta, 2018). These results show that our findings remain stable and even improve in a fixed-effects setting (see Table A2 in the Supplemental appendix).…”