How do People Influence Politics? Explaining Cross-National Variation in the Relationship between Engagement in Party and Movement Politics

The decreasing numbers of voter turnout and party membership rates, accompanied with a recent protest upsurge are often seen as a confirmation that protesting has become a substitute to electoral politics.The postmaterialist thesis argues that these processes in the non-electoral and electoral field are directly related to each other and that people who are active in movement politics areless likely to be active in party politics, because they are disappointed with party politics. However, empirical evidence for such a negative relationship is inconclusive. Moreover, most empirical studies seem to neglect that the relationship between participation in party and movement politics could differ across countries. In this study we examine this relationship between individual engagement in party and movement politics. Using various cross-national surevey datasets covering all continents (Afrobarometer, Asian Barometer, CID, ESS, ISSP, and LAPOP), we built a harmonized dataset including 109 countries in the period 2000-2014. We focused on two relationships: the relationship between contacting a politician and demonstrating on the one hand and voting and demonstrating on the other hand. We used meta-analytic techniques (two-stage Individual Participant Data Meta-Analysis) to test explanations at the contextual-level (i.e. at the country-year) for why participation in movement and in party politics are related differently across countries. The results indicate that the association between the two types of political participation is generally positive. Yet, cross-national variation in the effect size exists and seems to be largely explained by differences in the proportion of the population that has postmaterialist values; people in post-materialist societies are less likely to use the two types of political participation as complementary pathways to politics.