ABSTRACT
This book is about different forms of political participation in democracies, and in what ways the delegation of public responsibilities – or, the diffusion of politics – has affected patterns of participation since the 1980s. Over the past decades, democratic governments have seen a number of institutional reforms, in part intended to increase citizens’ political involvement, and often as a result of pressures from citizens for greater access to political decision-making. Yet, studies of political participation show a continued decline in regular political engagement. This book addresses this paradox by directly investigating the impact of institutional changes on citizens’ political participation empirically. It re-analyzes patterns of political participation in contemporary democracies. Whereas many commentators fear a decline of political participation and the rise of apathy and alienation, this study provides an in-depth time series cross-sectional analysis that shows that citizens have not become more apathetic. Instead, they have reallocated or displaced their activities to a broader array of forms of participation. Moreover, this displacement has come about as a result of governments’ increasing tendency to diffuse their activities to private, sub-national and supra- or inter-governmental areas of governance. As such, the book attempts to initiate a more unstrained dialogue between neo-institutionalism and behavioural approaches to the study of politics. Moreover, the book re-analyzes in what way changed political behaviour and changed institutional structures affect democracy: while the change in patterns of political participation does not imply popular apathy, do they suggest democracy is doing all right?
