ABSTRACT
Over the last decades, established democracies have experienced a considerable decline in traditional forms of political participation such as voting, party identification, and party membership, while direct citizen involvement in political affairs has surged. Ronald Inglehart has argued that an ongoing cognitive mobilization in advanced Western democracies has enabled citizens to act as political subjects, rather than as objects of elite decision-making and has characterized this process as a change from elite-directed to elite-challenging political participation. Fundamental changes in living and working conditions in post-industrial democracies, in conjunction with the economic recession of the past decade, have also facilitated the rise of right-wing populist movements and parties whose political demands are very different from the New Politics envisioned by Ronald Inglehart. This raises two questions: The first is whether the return of traditional political concerns on the political agenda will reinvigorate old political loyalties, or whether it will rather precipitate the ongoing erosion of traditional political ties. The second question is more fundamental and asks for the impact of the rise of monitory democracy on the security of elite position-holding and on the ability of elites to aggregate an increasingly diverse spectrum of interest groups, media, and ad-hoc citizen initiatives. This paper presents empirical evidence on the changes in political participation and their impact on elites.
