Equality Lost? The Democratisation of Democracy and the Perils of Unequal Participation

Abstract

In many advanced democracies, turnout has been declining over the last decades. As Herbert Tingsten famously noted in the 1930s, low turnout is usually unequal turnout. The less privileged disproportionately abstain from voting whereas the well-off tend to vote at comparatively higher rates. As a consequence, the most basic way of political engagement has grown more unequal. At the same time, new forms of political participation have been instituted and become increasingly popular. They range from direct democracy to participatory budgets or citizen juries to more unconventional kinds of protest activities. Citizens can now partake in politics in unprecedented ways. Many observers welcome this ongoing “democratization of democracy” because it offers more meaningful ways of political participation. However, the downside of this development could be a further decline of political equality as empirical studies indicate that participation beyond voting is even more strongly biased towards the resource-rich than voting is. In this panel, we address these parallel processes empirically and theoretically. We seek to answer to what degree political participation is unequal, which forms of participation are most egalitarian and whether there are democratic innovations that help to reduce political inequality. From a theoretical point of view, the contributions to the panel speak to the question if unequal participation harms the principle of political equality which is at the core of democracy.

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