The Electoral and Protest Participation Nexus in Old and New Democracies

• In Event: Elections and Protests

Abstract

The conventional modes of political participation, particularly elections, have an important place in the studies of social movements. They are the primary mechanism to provide a political system's responsiveness, which is enhanced if all citizens have opportunities for their preferences to be equally heard in government. In that regard, protest participation remains as a secondary political behavior to voting as a mechanism for increasing political representation. Up to date, this assumption was not tested in the literature. This study looks at the relationship between voting and protesting by asking the question of in what circumstances protest is a complementary or an alternative to electoral participation. Therefore, this study separately examines the relationship between political representation and modes of political action for groups who attend protests because the government is not responsive to their preferences or they attend protests because they are politically active citizens that take protests complementary to political involvement through voting. Using surveys conducted by European Social Survey from 2002 to 2018, this study finds that increasing incongruence between individuals and governments increases the probability of protests to be both an alternative and complement to voting in old democracies. As opposed to that, the study does not find an evidence for the increasing probability of protest participation as an alternative to voting.

Author

• yasemin tosun