Political participation and responsiveness. Assessing the micro-macro relation.

Democratic theorists argue that political participation has positive effects on this type of regime. In the literature, participation is often studied as an effect, but rarely it has been investigated as an independent variable. Notwithstanding, within the framework of “democratic quality”, political participation is seen as an element which has an impact on other spheres of democracy. The interest for studying political participation as an effects comes from the idea that it fosters political and social trust, political interest and knowledge, political self-consciousness and, eventually, satisfaction for democracy. Therefore, participation can be seen as an engine fostering attitudes and behaviors which strengthen democracy and its legitimacy. Thus, seen the problems of disentangling the effects and the role of political participation in democracies, I think that an empirical reconsideration of this topic should be undertaken. In this paper I intend to explore the relationship between different forms of political participation and responsiveness, the outcome dimension of democracy, meant as the capacity of governments to formulate and implement the policies that to citizens desire, measured as satisfaction for democracy. I hypothesize that the various modes of political participation have multiple effects on responsiveness, depending on some structural factors related to the political system, such as party system and political institutions, and on individual level characteristics. Hence, the aim of the paper is to investigate, by using multi-level analysis and data from Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and the Quality of Government dataset, the micro-macro relation between political participation and responsiveness.