Previous research on political participation suggests that western democracies are currently suffering the yoke of mass citizen withdrawal from traditional channels of political participation. Yet, a more optimistic view suggests a countervailing trend in political participation and proposes that unconventional forms of political participation are on the rise. Instead of withdrawal from politics, citizens increasingly employ unconventional means of participation to exert pressure on political decision-making processes. However, most research focused on the United States, whereas trends in both conventional and unconventional political participation have rarely been studied cross-nationally in Europe. Another important and usually overlooked problem in studies on political participation is the comparability and equivalence of measurements across nations. We employ probabilistic scale modeling techniques, using data on 205,763 individuals in 22 European countries covering three decades. The aim of this paper is therefore twofold: a) to provide a description of trends in both conventional and unconventional political participation in Europe in recent decades that b) are comparable across years and nations. We find stable levels of conventional and unconventional political participation in Europe in recent decades, neither confirming mass citizen withdrawal from politics nor confirming a switch from conventional to unconventional means of participation.
