The Changing Role of Citizen Engagement in Today’s Challenges: Participation, Movements, Protest

This Section aims to bring together panels around current issues in the study of political participation and social movements. Scholars of democratic theory, participation, social movement mobilization and political parties have pointed to the fact that understandings and expectations of the (political) engagement of citizens are constantly evolving. As a consequence, pathways of critique and opposition to power assume new forms: movements and protests emerge and develop differently than they have in the past. The contemporary rise of right-wing populism as well as shifting movement landscapes and repertoires of political participation bear witness to these moving grounds. This ever-changing landscape of citizen participation demands ongoing research into who becomes active, why, how and to what effect. At the same time, citizen engagement is also hotly debated from various normative standpoints. Many theories of democracy consider citizen engagement to be the solution to multiple crises of democratic legitimation or efficiency. Others see it as a cause for democratic inequality, and point out that it can lead to decreasing democratic problem-solving capacities when the expectation of (direct) democratic influence by the people or social movement organizations make decision-making slow and consensus unlikely. With this section we want to take a closer look at topics that enable to better understand citizen’s shifting demands for, and patterns of, participation, and how social movement organizations and other actors, including governments, media, and companies respond to these demands. We call for panels, which speak to both, the more established core interests in the study of political participation and social movements as well as the more recent or emerging areas of academic enquiry. In line with the scope of the standing group on participation and mobilization, this section particularly aims at bringing the literature on political participation and social movements closer together. The panels in this section seek to explore several topics for which citizen engagement has long been highly relevant, or where their role has recently changed dramatically. We expect that such a topical focus will facilitate discussions that are empirically coherent and theoretically innovative. Felix Butzlaff is an Assistant Professor at the Vienna University for Economics and Business and member of the steering committee of the SG on Participation and Mobilization. Joost de Moor is a Postdoc at Stockholm University and convenor of the Standing Group on Participation and Mobilization.