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CHAPTER NINE: POLITICAL PARTICIPATION

9.1 Political participation: activity by individuals formally intended to influence who governs or the decisions taken by those who do. Citizens can be classified by both the extent and the forms of their involvement. Forms of individual participation: voluntary participation (liberal democracies), channelled participation (illiberal democracies), regimented participation (totalitarian) and manipulated participation (authoritarian regimes) (pp.165).

 

9.2 Gladiators, spectators and apathetics. Participation skewed to well-educated, middle-class, middle-aged white men. Political resources and political interest as explanations. Under-representation of women, especially at higher levels. PR, high turnover in the legislature and party quotas as facilitators of female representation. Political exclusion (p. 165-7).

 

9.3. Social movements as collective challenges to established authorities. Contrasts with parties and interest groups. Modern communications facilitates national and transnational co-ordination e.g. anti-Iraq war protests in 2003. But need for a policy entrepreneur in mobilizing poorer groups. Local and single-issue orientation often limits national significance. Movement activists often migrate to established politics (pp.168-72).

 

9.4 Patron-client networks (clientelism) as a form of manipulated participation in authoritarian regimes. Clientelism defined: both a response to insecurity and an affirmation of inequality (pp. 172-3).

 

9.5 Regimented participation in totalitarian regimes: high in quantity but low in quality. Decay of participation in China since the Cultural Revolution (pp. 173-4).

 

9.6 Problems of building a civil society in illiberal democracies: anti-politics, poverty and the strong-man tradition (pp. 174-5).

 

9.7 Participation in political violence, terror and genocide should be viewed through the lens of conventional political analysis, not as an expression of individual pathology. Although participants in suicide missions tend to be young, unmarried men with an above average education and social status, only a small proportion of these engage in extreme acts. The case of Rwanda (pp. 175-9).

 

9.8 Revolutions as usually-violent system changes. Social psychological theory and relative deprivation. Contrasted with structural theories - relationships between classes and states The French and Russian revolutions as case studies (pp. 179-83).