Participation and Democracy: Dynamics, Causes ... - Jacobs University

authors have demonstrated how a comparative approach can be applied in a large-scale
project based on media reports in several countries. 17
However, aiming at dynamics of protests, this approach focuses on a protest event or a
series of events as the unit(s) of analysis. 18 The information that can be gathered from
media reports is usually not very detailed and restricted to the individual event (Rucht
and Ohlemacher 1992: 77). Thus, media reports concentrate on an event as the unit of
analysis, and this focus may not suit all research questions addressing scope and changes
in political behavior. In particular, the fact that media-reported events provide only little
information about the individuals who are participating appears to be a major drawback
of this approach.
In comparison to alternative ways to gain knowledge about people’s attitudes and
behavior, asking people directly whether they have participation in elite-challenging
activities appears to be the most fruitful approach. In contrast to measures of
institutionalized participation, information about spontaneous and irregular political
activities cannot be obtained through official data collections about membership rates or
the number of participants (an exception might be when the number of participants is
estimated by police officials). Official statistics exist, for example, only for voter
turnout, very often broken down to levels of national, regional and local elections. Their
advantage is, in most cases, that the data are quite reliable and easily accessible. 19 Also
available for a number of cases but less precise are membership figures for political
parties or labor unions. However, for elite-challenging participation this is not an option,
given the short-term, issue-specific, transient and irregular nature of this activity. As a
consequence, the subsequent empirical analyses on elite-challenging participation will
be based on data provided by cross-national surveys.
Survey research has often been criticized for various reasons that I will not outline here
in detail, and it also did not escape criticism when applied to measure participation.
Three major points of critique as well as suggestions on how to deal with these problems
17 The research project was coordinated at the Science Centre in Berlin, Germany (Wissenschaftszentrum
Berlin, WZB).
18 „A protest event is defined as a distinct collective action pursuing an explicit goal by the use of
confrontative, disruptive or violent means“ (Rucht and Ohlemacher 1992: 77).
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