ABSTRACT
As foreshadowed in the previous chapter, political participation can be defined in a number of ways. The previous chapter concentrated on electoral engagement and showed electoral engagement to be very low among the young. Yet, while there has been a steady secular erosion in electoral engagement the late twentieth century saw an expanding array of political activity that citizens are engaged in such as attending a demonstration and boycotting consumer products for political reasons. I have classified such activities as non-electoral forms of political participation. Hay (2008, 26) argues that ‘A mounting body of recent research suggests that, far from being apathetic politically, a significant proportion of those who regard themselves as having disengaged entirely from formal politics are actively engaged in modes of informal yet collective political conduct.’ Therefore, this chapter takes into account non-electoral forms of political participation in order to put the erosion in electoral engagement documented in the previous chapter in broader perspective.
