Since the seminal studies on voting behavior in the 1950s, political participation research has evolved as citizens’ action repertoire enlarged in Western democracies. In the present time, the emergence of “creative” forms of political participation has revitalized it. The relatively lower costs involved in Internet actions, political consumerism and other new forms of political expression are particularly well received in a context of declining political engagement in traditional political. Evidence so far signals their potential to narrow the participatory gap between young citizens and adults or between women and men. However, it has also been suggested that, for instance, online and offline participants are not that different. Therefore, the question remains open regarding whether new modes of participation are attracting new participants — hence reducing inequality— or whether they just represent new participatory channels used by the same “old” activists. To contribute to this debate, this paper focuses on examining the relationship between different modes of political participation and, in doing so, participants’ profiles. It specifically updates a preliminary exploration of the latent structure of political participation with the European Social Survey data. Using the stochastic cumulative scale analysis procedure proposed by Robert Mokken successfully identified two dimensions, institutional and non-institutional participation. Furthermore, it permitted the construction of equivalent scales across countries by using the identity sets as the basis to include national-specific items in the instruments. The present contribution will first explore whether new forms of participation such as political consumerism and Internet activism conform to one of the scales or, on the contrary, represent a dimension on its own. Secondly, the resulting scales will be used to explore the profile of each type of participant to answer the following questions: are new forms of participation that new? And, do they provide channels through which new voices can be heard?
