Political Mobilisation, Political Participation and the Power of the Vote

At the time when West European Politics was launched 30 years ago, a set of landmark studies was published that put the field of political participation on a new foundation. First, the ‘Political Action’ study by Barnes, Kaase and their co-authors (1979) extended the notion of political participation to include not only ‘conventional’ electoral or related forms of participation, but also ‘unconventional’ forms, i.e. different varieties of political protest. Since this path-breaking study, it has become common knowledge that unconventional, non-electoral forms of political participation have been on the rise in Western Europe.