ABSTRACT
Democratic citizenship entails equal rights to participate in the governing process. Equal opportunities to express one’s opinions are bestowed upon citizens in all spheres of political activity. This is, in theory, the normative requirement of political equality. In this chapter we shall assess the extent to which our 13 societies under study deviate from this norm. We will make this assessment with regard to the same five modes of political activity as presented in Chapter 13: contacting, consumer participation, protest, party activity, and voting. Following Verba et al. (1978), we will adopt the characteristics of ‘participatory systems’ as our dependent variable. This requires, first of all, a more refined set of evaluative criteria as a framework for empirical analysis. We shall then assess more specifically the extent to which individuals with certain attitudinal preferences are more participatory than others, the degree to which particular social groups are over-or under-represented, and the causal roots of this overand under-representation. We portray the overall levels of political equality in each country under study, and finally conclude by summing up our results.
