Varieties of democratic understanding and political participation: multi-level evidence from the world

ABSTRACT

This article explores the linkage between different conceptualisations of democracy and forms of political participation. Specifically, it examines the correlates of conventional and unconventional modes of political participation, especially in light of three major understandings of democracy, namely liberal, redistributive, and authoritative understandings. This article maintains that different notions of democracy have their unique relationships with different forms of political participation. The article argues that people with a predominantly liberal notion of democracy are expected to partake in both conventional and unconventional modes of political participation, whereas those with an authoritative understanding of democracy are relatively more hesitant to take part in both forms. Finally, citizens with a redistributive notion of democracy are expected to appear more in unconventional forms of political participation, such as boycotts and lawful demonstrations. We test our arguments based on a global and up-to-date dataset and a multi-level framework, which covers more than 100,000 democratic citizens across the globe.

KEYWORDS:

• Democracy
• political participation
• liberal democracy
• redistribution
• authority
• voting

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to express their gratitude to Tekin Kose, Rodolfo Sarsfield, Efe Tokdemir, Emre Toros, and Meral Ugur-Cinar for their valuable suggestions for the earlier drafts of this article. They also thank the Editorial Team of Contemporary Politics and the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. As always, all responsibility for errors lies with the authors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Earlier waves of the WVS do not have the necessary survey items for our main explanatory variables on different understandings of democracy. Still, our dataset has two most recent WVS waves, which includes more than 100,000 participants all over the world.

2 Membership to political parties, which was discussed under conventional political participation, does not form a cluster with voting behaviour in factor analysis and hence was not included in the PCA.

3 Here, we should make a brief note regarding the nature of our dependent variables. Based on Gherghina and Geissel (2017), our conventional political participation index is based on ‘retrospective’ aspect of participation, whereas our unconventional political participation index is based on ‘prospective’ aspect of participation. While there may be theoretical differences between these notions (Gherghina and Geissel concludes that the correlation between preferences for political-decision makers and political participation is relatively stronger when asking respondents about prospective participation versus asking them about retrospective participation), the researchers argue that there are major similarities in their empirical measures, which makes them comparable for our analyses too.

4 Our dataset and the replication files are available upon request.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kursat Cinar

Kursat Cinar earned his PhD in Political Science from the Ohio State University. His research interests centre on party politics, democratisation, political institutions, development, and gender politics. His articles appeared in many journals such as Democratization, Social Indicators Research, Politics & Gender, Social Politics, Political Studies, Contemporary Politics, and South European Society & Politics. Dr Cinar’s books titled The Decline of Democracy in Turkey: A Comparative Study of Hegemonic Party Rule (2019) and Women's Empowerment in Turkey and Beyond (Ed.) (2020) have been published by Routledge Press. A chapter written by Cinar on clientelism has appeared in the Sage Encyclopedia of Political Behavior. Dr Cinar is a Fulbright and EU Marie Curie Alumnus and the recipient of the 2019 Science Academy of Turkey Distinguished Young Scientist of the Year and the 2013 Sakıp Sabancı International Research Awards. Dr Cinar is an Associate Professor at Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey, Department of Political Science and Public Administration.

Asya Bulbul

Asya Bulbul received her Master’s degree in Political Science and Public Administration from Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey. Her main research interests are democratisation, comparative political behaviour, and political psychology. She is currently an independent researcher. Ms Bulbul is currently a Political Science PhD student at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook.