Going, Going, … Reviving? Political Activism in Modern Europe

The decline of conventional forms of political participation in European democracies, including voter turnout, party membership and other traditional forms of political and civic activism, is a prominent topic in the academic literature. Its long-term drop indicates that core functions of the affected democracies are eroding, which poses a threat to their legitimization (Kersting & Woyke, 2012: 138; Merkel, 2015). However, it would be too early to close the case on the alleged ‘crisis’ of political participation before considering alternative modes of engagement, especially protest politics and internet activism. It has been argued that the magnitude of the latter has risen dramatically during the late twentieth century as citizens are becoming increasingly critical of political authority (Norris, 2002: 197). Hence, declining levels of conventional forms of participation are not necessarily alarming. Instead, there is a change in the style of participation with protest politics and internet activism becoming increasingly widespread (Dalton, 2006: 11). However, evidence for this shift of political participation patterns remains inconclusive. While empirical research on protest politics is fairly outdated, research on e-participation respectively is largely concerned with Western European democracies, notably Belgium, the Netherlands and Scandinavian countries, without giving a comparative account encompassing all European democracies. The paper wants to fill in this gap. Its aim is to give a current and comprehensive report of the magnitude and development of political participation. The analysis will be guided by the question as to whether a change in the pattern of political participation toward unconventional forms of engagement takes place in the 21st century. Thereby, earlier studies predicting this shift will be put to test. For this purpose, the paper takes on a longitudinal approach focusing on recent years from the early 2000s until 2015. Moreover, a large-N design focusing on all democracies in Scandinavia, Western and Southern Europe as well as Central and Eastern Europe is chosen to increase comparability. The paper is divided into three main sections: first, recent developments in conventional forms of political participation will be discussed, including voting turnout, party membership and other traditional forms of political and civic activism. The second part of this paper is concerned with protest politics, specifically participation in lawful demonstrations, signing petitions and boycotting certain products. Finally, recent trends in internet activism will be portrayed, including information-seeking, participation in e-petitions and crowdsourcing as well as discussing politics on the Web. It will be concluded that positive developments can be observed for some indicators of each form of political participation especially after 2012, which suggests that concerns about both (1) an alleged crisis of political participation as well as (2) predictions about changing participation patterns may be exaggerated.