Voting meanings and Political participation

The continuing decline in electoral participation and the growing number of disaffected voters have challenged the question of citizen involvement in politics. Yet, it has been shown that citizens have not lost their willingness to participate and have instead increasingly relied on more non-conventional forms of participation to ‘make themselves heard’. The scholarly literature on explaining different forms of political participation is vast, ranging from contextual factors, such as the electoral system or political mobilisation, to individual-level factors, such as personal resources and political attitudes. In this paper, I argue that citizen perceptions of voting – a facet largely neglected in the existing literature –play a crucial role when it comes to understand who participates and how in politics. I thus examine the relations between the meaning ordinary citizens attach to the act of voting and the form of participation they choose to pursue, or not to pursue. Put differently, voting conceptualisations could help further explain different participation patterns and to understand what encourages some citizens to vote, while others are driven away from the electoral arena and pursue other non-electoral activities. This argument is tested in a comparative perspective using original survey data collected in several countries worldwide that held parliamentary elections in 2022. Via a Latent Class Analysis, I will empirically derive the participation profiles of the populations under investigation. This inductive approach will allow me to assess how citizens combine different political activities such as voting, demonstrating, signing petition and online political engagement, and the extent to which these behaviours are linked to different perceptions of the act of voting. The study’s findings will provide important insights on formal and informal citizen (non-)involvement in politics as well as insights into what can be done to address the declining rate of citizen involvement in politics.