Typologies of Political Participation: How and Why Political Behavior Differs across the World?

Countries in the world are different in terms of the dominant types of political participation people adopt. These differences not only derive from the individual motifs, but also from the national political-institutional contexts. The political choices citizens end up making, depend on the supply of politics they encounter. According to Elster’s Two-Filter Model (1979), political action can be understood in terms of two successive filtering processes. In the first process, structural constraints reduce the universe of possible alternatives to a relatively small subset of possibilities. In the second filtering process, the individual chooses alternatives from the feasible set of options. The aim of our article is to examine types of political participation in 110 countries across the world, considering a set of individual and contextual characteristics. We use and adjust the classical study of Verba and Nie (1972), by distinguishing four types of participants: (1) inactives; (2) voters (who only vote, but do not engage in other activities); (3) parochial participants (those who prefer personally contacting politicians) (4) protesters, or, communalists (those who demonstrate, but might also vote and contact politicians next to it). Based on ample scholarship we argue that these participatory types adhere to different characteristics of individuals and are practiced at higher or lower degree depending on the institutional setting. The main argument is that the individual social characteristics are not a sufficient condition for becoming a certain type of participant: political context also matters. The Arab Spring and the anti-government demonstrations in Ukraine in 2014 and more recently in Romania serve as good examples of citizens using protesting as a tool to influence government. In other words, protesting is not only a privilege of post-industrial societies, as Inglehart would argue a few decades ago. Referring to Elster’s Two-Filter Model, we are particularly interested in the interaction effects between micro and macro level factors on the types of participation. To what extent similarly characterized individuals participate in politics similarly or differently in different countries? We depart from the theoretical background on participatory trends in post-industrial democracies, both testing and challenging it. The four types of political participants are examined using multinomial multilevel regression models. Next to the standard individual level variables, we also test the country-level characteristics: levels of democraticness, social cleavages, ‘Old’ vs ‘New’ democracies, political institutions and economic conditions. As subjective attributes of a society we include the aggregate levels of political trust and cynicism, as well as satisfaction with democracy. The results of the cross-level interactions disclose a bigger picture on how micro-level effects, determining a particular type of participation, differ between countries. The mega data used in the research consist of the global surveys: European Social Survey, United States Citizenship, Involvement, Democracy Survey, the Latin American Public Opinion Project, the Afrobarometer, the Asian barometer, and the International Social Survey Programme. Together, the pooled dataset includes comparable information from approximately 540 000 respondents. The extensive cross-national data gives us a unique opportunity to compare the types of participants, considering both individual and country-level factors.