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. Participation as monitoring. How important is participation? Conventional and unconventional participation (pp. 161-62).

9.2 Gladiators, spectators and apathetics. Few gladiators. 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. 162-65).

9.3. Social movements as collective challenges to established authorities. Contrasts with parties and interest groups. Modern communications facilitates national and trans-national co-ordination e.g. anti-Iraq war protests in 2003. Local and single-issue orientation often limits national significance. Movement activists often migrate to established politics (pp.165-68).

9.4 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 (pp. 168-70).

9.5 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. 170-72).

9.6 Regimented participation in totalitarian regimes: high in quantity but low in quality. Decay of participation in China since the Cultural Revolution (pp. 172-73).

9.7 Problems of building a civil society in illiberal democracies: anti-politics, poverty and the strong-man tradition (pp. 173-76).

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