Participation

No society, be it traditional or modern, can exist and survive without the active engagement of its members in the various domains of life that have resulted from processes of social differentiation and that, in toto, constitute societies and polities at large. This does not imply that every member of any given society has to be active in each domain. What it means, however, is that each domain encompasses individuals (the microlevel), an intermediary structure (the mesolevel) linking individuals and institutions in that domain, and systemic elements crystallized in rules and institutions regulating the particular domain in question (the macrolevel). Especially in modern times, these three levels are complemented by a fourth overarching level linking units in various ways (globalization is a particular phenomenon resulting from such linking processes). Notwithstanding the fact that presently there is an ongoing debate in political science on the shrinking role of the nation-state, the nearly 200 nation-states in existence are the major macro-units of analysis in comparative political science, whether they are considered in full or as subsets and whether the core emphasis in systematic analyses is on the micro-, the meso-, or the macrolevel or any combination of them. Below, first, a definition of various aspects of participation is provided. This is followed by a discussion of the underlying methods and theoretical concepts. The various dimensions of political participation are then discussed in greater detail. In conclusion, some of the major current developments and consequences for contemporary democracies are pointed out.

Participation refers, first, to activities by individual members of any given meso- or macro-unit of analysis. Second, in the core of participation is the action itself—that is, individual behavior—even if attitudes as the antecedents of such behavior, as obtained in survey research, may also be of interest. Third, individuals never act in a social void; therefore, to understand why people act at all and in the way they do, one has to consider the embeddedness of individuals in a context conducive to action. This context can be the institutional arrangements on the macrolevel (e.g., for voting, the electoral law in a given country) or the social environment that an individual is part of. Fourth, modern social science is not only about structure and persistence but also about dynamics and change, with obvious implications for research designs. Fifth, and returning to the concept of [Page 1778]domains as subunits of sociopolitical systems resulting from processes of differentiation in contemporary societies, participation for the purpose of this entry is divided into a part on political participation and a—smaller—part on social participation (there are other fields worth looking at, e.g., cultural participation, but here the data situation is unsatisfactory, and to reach out beyond the two fields just alluded to would overstretch the scope of the entry).