ABSTRACT
This chapter firstly formulates the problems of political participation drawing on the foundational issues underpinning various disciplinary–based approaches calling for their rapprochement. It then outlines an analytical framework that can be applied cross–nationally but also contextualised to account for a society’s political history and trajectory. The framework draws on Foucault, Habermas, and Sen’s foundational concepts of rationality, reason, power, and agency, where there are philosophical coherence and methodological synergies to develop three domains of analysis. These three domains operate interdependently as a discursive formation of a system of knowledge about political participation that sets boundaries and possibilities in chosen domains (such as cultural, civic, economic, education, politics) and periods of analysis. While domain 1 ‘renders visible’ the regime of truth and the mechanisms and authorities in charge of mobilising the truth regime that construct a tacit knowledge about political participation, domains 2 and 3 point to the transition of discursive practices by political agents within the regime allowing the researchers to trace the formation of the knowledge and power, and knowledge and power changes. The chapter argues that this transition of power/knowledge is critical in understanding which conditions and conditionings are repressive or productive for political actors. The framework offers a method of analysis that inquires rather than prescribes a normative view about ‘political’ being and doing in order to gain insights into political participation and implications for democratic capability in authoritarian states.
