Summary literature Political Participation and Protest
Van Deth (2014): a conceptual map of political participation
The continuous expansion of available modes of political participation in the last decades underlines
the relevance of political participation for democracy and democratization. Those with the most
restrictive and conventional conceptions of political participation identify a strong and consistent
pattern of declining political participation and engagement over time, whilst those with a more
inclusive conception discern instead a change in the mode of political participation. The trend in
political activity represents changes in the style of political action, and not just changes in the level of
participation. Many newer, ‘creative’, ‘personalized’, ‘individualized’ or ‘conscious’ modes of
participation such as political consumption, street parties or guerrilla gardening are non-political
activities used for political purposes. Only the expression of political aims or intentions transforms
these activities into modes of political participation: boycotting a brand of athletic shoes is, as such,
not a political activity, but it can easily become one if the shopper explicitly expresses her intention
that her refusal should be understood as an utterance for legislation restricting child labour.
Political participation can be loosely defined as citizens’ activities affecting politics. Usually,
participation is considered to be an abstract concept (measured as a continuum) covering these
specific modes of participation as manifestations or expressions (or positions on a continuum). The
term ‘repertoire’ refers to a range of things that someone can do; that is, a repertoire of political
participation compromises all available activities affecting politics. 4 points commonly defining
political participation include: political participation is an action, understood as something done by
people in their role as citizens. It should be voluntary and not enforced by law. It usually deals with
government, politics or the state in a broad sense of these words. Zukin et al stress the need of
activities to be organized in order to be examples of civic engagement, which brings us very close to
Norris’ idea of political participation as an ‘… attempt to alter systematic patterns of social
behaviour’. So whether a phenomenon is a form of political participation or not is hard to define,
therefore, the key question is not what a comprehensive (nominal) definition could look like, but:
how would you recognize a mode of participation if you see one?
A minimalist definition of political participation is that it is a voluntary activity by citizens in
the area of government, politics of the state. So, in order to be conceptualized as political
participation by this minimalist definition, the answers to the following 4 questions need to be ‘yes’:
Do we deal with behavior? Is the activity voluntary? Is the activity done by citizens? Is the activity
located in the sphere of government/state/politics? In order to be a targeted definition of political
participation, the activity should also be targeted at the sphere of government/state/politics. If
these activities aren’t targeted at or located in the sphere of government/state/politics, it can still be
considered a targeted mode of political participation if it aims at solving collective or community
problems. Under the motivational definition an action can also be considered a form of political
participation if it is used to express political aims and intentions by the participants. Together these
four types cover the whole range of modes of political participation systematically and efficiently: a
minimalist definition is developed first and additional variants are based on indispensable additional
features only. More aspects can be taken into account – legality, legitimacy, effectiveness, non-
violence, Internet use and so on – but are not compulsory for the conceptualization of political
participation.
Hutter & Hanspeter (2013): Movements of the Left, Movements of the Right Reconsidered
Most social movement scholars neglect analyzing the electoral channel, which causes social
movement research to overlook the most important contemporary collective actors mobilizing
against the consequences of globalization—the populist radical right, which effectively mobilizes the
cultural anxieties of the losers of globalization. the common denominator of populist movements
,puts an emphasis on the fundamental role of the people; it claims that the people have been
betrayed by those in charge, that is, that the elites are accused of abusing their position of power,
and that the primacy of the people has to be restored. However populism expresses itself in the
electoral channel of representative politics, and in the way they mobilize, populists often rely on
charismatic leadership or at least centralized political organizations. We argue that this paradox is
linked to the basic value orientations characterizing the left and the right, which ultimately lead to a
different relationship of the mobilization in the electoral and protest arenas, depending on whether
we look at movements of the left or movements of the right.
Protest politics is affected by globalization processes. By and large, cultural liberalism lost
ground after the 1980s. Immigration became even more salient than cultural liberalism by the 1990s.
Thus we can see that “immigration and ethnic relations . . . constitute since the early 1990s the most
prominent and controversial fields of political contention in West European polities.” Voices against
immigration are relatively more prominent in countries where the populist radical right could not
establish itself in the electoral arena. The left’s mobilization of protest has been characterized by the
cosmopolitanism of the globalization winners. But articulating the cosmopolitanism of the
globalization winners in the protest arena, the left has missed the grievances of the globalization
losers who are now mobilized by the new populist radical right.
Flanagan and Lee find differing orientations toward political involvement between
authoritarians (who tend to be closer to the right) and libertarians (who tend to be closer to the left).
Authoritarians are joiners of conventional groups, such as political parties or professional
associations, in essentially equal proportions with libertarians. Social or political libertarianism and
post-materialism are associated with grassroots activity, and post-materialism turned out to be most
important in stimulating such activity. Flanagan and Lee show that libertarians exhibit higher levels of
organizational membership but are no more likely to do unpaid voluntary work in the organizations
to which they belong than are authoritarians. Moreover, authoritarians are vastly more likely to do
voluntary work out of a desire to be of service to others, whereas motivations of libertarians seem to
be more self-serving. Left-wing citizens are more likely to turn to protest activities than their
counterparts on the right in all twenty Western democracies that they studied during the early
2000s.
We group the different parties into four party groups: radical left, moderate left, moderate
right, and radical right. The radical left includes the old communist as well as the new libertarian left
(e.g., green parties), and the moderate left corresponds to the social democrats. The moderate right
is composed of liberals, conservatives and Christian democrats, whereas the radical right includes
populist radical right parties (new and transformed) and other small radical right parties.
Our main point is that social movement scholars tend to neglect the existence of different
channels of mobilization, which leads them to misconstruct the changing dynamics of mobilization in
a global age. Populist radical right parties are characterized by a political paradox. Though very
critical of representative politics in the electoral channel, and pleading for a more direct linkage of
masses to elites, the populist radical right tends to choose the electoral channel, and not the protest
arena, to mobilize the people. This paradox is linked to what we call a strategy of double
differentiation, which is rooted in core value orientations of populist radical right leaders and
adherents. For the challengers on both the left and the right, the “medium is the message”; that is,
the choice of the channel in which they express themselves is at the same time an expression of their
underlying message. Whereas the rebels on the right have authoritarian and materialist values, and
prefer (orderly) conventional political action over (disorderly) protest politics, rebels on the left share
libertarian and postmaterialist values, which predispose them for unconventional protest politics.
,Krouwel & Kutiyski (2017): Idenitifying two types of Eurosceptic voters
In the 2014 European Elections, an apparent shift to more-critical popular attitudes towards
European integration and pooling of sovereignty in the Brussels parliament became visible. While the
aggregate distribution of power in European Parliament did not change much, at the level of
individual member states significant electoral shifts occurred with possible far reaching
consequences for the policy direction of the EU – or at least the European leaders’ room to
manoeuvre. ‘Protest’ parties on both the left and right have successfully politicised issue dimensions,
with the radical left opposing austerity policies and welfare state retrenchment while defending
workers’ rights, and the radical right opposing immigration, labour migration and European
integration. Both of these opposing political fringes managed to improve their results in 2014, at the
expense of mainstream competitors. Particularly in European elections, voters are more likely to
support smaller and radical parties on all flanks of the political spectrum, rather than the centrist
mainstream parties they tend to support in national elections. The timing of second-order elections
also matters, with establishment parties often taking a bigger hit when European elections take place
midterm between two national ballots. This suggests that Eurosceptic attitudes among many voters
are dependent on political and economic circumstances and should not be considered as a static,
homogeneous opposition to the European project.
As Eurosceptic parties gain electoral ground across the continent, it is necessary to analyse
the format and cohesion of opinion structures of their supporters, in order to determine how
widespread hard anti-EU sentiments are versus more ‘soft’ and diffuse feelings of discontent with
particular aspects of European integration. In this chapter we assess the differences in opinion
structure towards European integration of voters that consistently support Eurosceptic parties in
both national as well as EP elections, and voters that support mainstream parties in national
parliamentary elections, yet switch to Eurosceptic parties in EP elections. We analyse four cases
where radical right Eurosceptic parties achieved significant electoral results at the expense of
mainstream parties – the United Kingdom, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands.
Mudde argues that Eurosceptic parties cannot be characterised as a homogenous group and
distinguishes between ‘radical’ and ‘extreme’ anti-European parties on the basis of their attitudes
towards democracy. According to Mudde, radical parties accept the core tenets of democracy, while
extreme parties challenge the existing institutional format of representative democracy as well as
core democratic norms. Wessels argues that negative sentiments directed against specific aspects of
the EU ‘authorities’ are likely to accumulate and develop into diffuse scepticism directed against the
European community as a whole. He also asserts that those who ‘oppose the idea of a community’
often have negative sentiments towards fellow European citizens and do not consider all Europeans
to belong to one collective. Based on this, Wessels distinguishes between Eurocritics, Eurosceptics
and adamant Eurosceptics: with critical Europeans merely demanding improvements of EU
institutions and changes in European policies, and (adamant) Eurosceptics advocating outright EU
disintegration. Attitudes towards the broader process of European integration refer to the extent to
which voters consider their country’s membership as legitimate, the extent to which they think
European integration undermines national sovereignty and the extent to which decision making in
the EU is democratic enough to override national parliaments. The second dimension – of specific
support – relates to two elements: the integrity and competence of the actors (thus evaluations of
the political elite) and evaluations of the outcomes (the institutions, the policies and the
performance of the EU). These distinctions help us to differentiate between ‘soft Eurosceptics’, who
oppose a specific policy outcome, but may still support the general idea of European integration, and
‘hard Eurorejects’, who abhor the idea of Europeanization altogether, and regard all EU institutions,
and the entire political and bureaucratic elite as illegitimate, incompetent and intrinsically corrupt.
Consistent Eurosceptics are also much more likely to consider that EU membership is a bad
thing for the country than those voters who support mainstream parties at national elections and
, only switched to Eurosceptics in the European election. Both groups do not differ much in their
attitudes towards redistribution within the EU, which indicates that on inter-EU financial bailouts and
crisis management both groups adopt rather similar (Calvinist) right-wing stances. We find that
switchers have higher levels of educational attainment in comparison with consistent Eurosceptics. In
general, we also find that consistent Eurosceptic voters are much less interested in politics than
those that switch partisan allegiance between national and European election. The core electorate of
Eurosceptic parties is composed of less educated voters with little political interest and rigid anti-EU
attitudes. To portray populist anti-establishment politics as a ‘backlash’ against economic
liberalisation resulting from neo-liberal policies, globalisation and Europeanization, is only part of the
picture. With no doubt, there is a ‘protective’ reflex – in terms of welfare state provisions – among
consistent supporters for Eurosceptic parties and in the election manifestos of these parties. As a
result of increased salience of cultural issues, liberal parties are becoming more and more internally
divided between a libertarian wing (in favour of free-market liberalism, personal freedoms, an
internationalist and cosmopolitan social outlook) and a more conservative faction (with Eurosceptic
and nationalist stances, in favour of stringent immigration and asylum policies, combined with a
mono-cultural outlook). This chapter has shown that, indeed, the core right-wing electorate is
already mobilised, particularly in second-order elections, but that mainstream politics still have an
edge with many voters in national elections.
Krouwel (2006): Party Models
Most of the party models are seriously biased. First, most party models were developed in the
context of western Europe and the United States of America, resulting in a limited ‘travelling
capacity’ of these conceptualizations, even across the Atlantic. Secondly, most party models are very
unidimensional in their approach, oftentimes focusing heavily or even exclusively on organizational
aspects. Duverger argued that ‘present-day parties are distinguished far less by their programme or
the class of their members than by the nature of their organization. A party is a community with a
particular structure. Modern parties are characterized primarily by their anatomy’.
In the literature of political science basically three methods of party classification have been
proposed and used. The first method is to simply list the party types and enumerate the major
characteristics of each of the different models. Katz and Mair, for example, distinguish four party
models (elite, mass, catch-all and cartel party) and then list 13 aspects on which these types of party
differ. As a second method, some scholars identify ‘genera’ of party types and subsequently chart all
the party types that have developed from each genus. A third method of classification is based on
more abstract dimensions along which parties differ. Wolinetz, for instance, uses the dimensions of
vote-seeking, policy-seeking and office-seeking to position six party types in a triangular space on the
basis of their primary goal. I opt for the most parsimonious and straightforward method of
differentiating parties on the basis of several crucial distinguishing characteristics.
The first cluster of modern parties (since the late 19th century) that can be distinguished are
loosely structured, elite-centred cadre parties led by prominent individuals, organized in closed and
local caucuses which have minimal organization outside parliament. The second cluster comprises all
models of mass parties. The defining elements of this type are extra-parliamentary mass mobilization
of politically excluded social groups on the basis of well-articulated organizational structures and
ideologies. The third species of party is the electoralist, catch-all party type. Catch-all parties
originate from mass parties that have professionalized their party organization and downgraded their
ideological profile in order to appeal to a wider electorate than their original class or religious social
base. A fourth species is the cartel party. Basically this party type is characterized by a fusion of the
party in public office with several interest groups that form a political cartel, which is mainly oriented
towards the maintenance of executive power. It is a professional organization that is largely
dependent on the state for its survival and has slowly retreated from civil society reducing its
