Introduction

Let's face it. We love it and think the more the better. Our ongoing passion for participation leads politicians and policy makers to cry out when it declines, and scholars of politics to track, trace and analyse the numerous ways in which individuals engage and disengage politically. Political scientists intensively debate where participation takes place – if it occurs only in parliamentary politics and government-oriented settings or also in other settings (van Deth, 2010; Stolle and Hooghe, 2006; McFarland, 2010; Scholzman, 2010; Stolle and Micheletti, 2013). Some scholars devise innovative theories, methods and materials to study emerging venues for citizen engagement outside government and commonly find that fears of participation's decay often are related to privileging certain forms of political activity over others. This insight helps to explain why politicians and policy makers in different countries target electoral participation among the youth, including suggesting compulsory first-time voting and lowering the legal voting age to 16 (for example, Swedish Save the Children Foundation's Youth Movement, 2006; IPPR, 2013). More general agreement coheres over the importance of the who of participation, a topic involving worries of whether or not pockets of participatory inequality exist, how and why they come about, and how they might be remedied (Brady, Verba and Schlozman, 1995; Verba, 2003; Stolle and Micheletti, 2005; Schlozman, Verba and Brady, 2012). Here scholars analyse the individual characteristics of participants and non-participants and ask whether gender, age, education, ethnicity, race, religion, income, social class and so on matter for who participates and who does not. The short answer is that they do. The general fear is that certain groups are better and others worse off at realising themselves in politics. Important concepts such as ‘mobilisation of bias’ (see below) and books like The Unheavenly Chorus: Unequal Political Voice and the Broken Promise of American Democracy (Schlozman, Verba and Brady, 2012) reflect this concern.

Research on participation does not stop here. Scholars examine how participation takes place, that is, through which forms, tools and methods. Though somewhat related to the where question above, this one is more about bringing scholarship up to date with today's political world. For instance, scholars might ask how politically concerned individuals target the ‘politics of products’ of transnational corporations since these entities have gained more political power through contemporary economic globalisation.