This review article points to a number of ways in which the study of political participation has followed separate tracks, hence preventing it from deploying its full potential. We argue that the field stands to benefit much from ‘bridging’ different approaches and insights, combining those from different disciplines or subdisciplines. We review works that try to build such bridges, with the aim of encouraging dialogue across the disciplinary boundaries between political science and political sociology, on the one hand, and sociology and social movement studies, on the other. We advocate that students of political participation take such ‘bridges’ seriously in their work and employ them as the basis for new dynamic theorization. We suggest five possible ways in which the study of political participation may combine different perspectives and research traditions. Three of them are theoretical: bridging rationalist, structuralist and culturalist theoretical approaches; bringing together cognitive (attitudes) and affective (emotions) explanations; and combining macro- and micro-level accounts. The fourth is methodological: bridging qualitative and quantitative methodological approaches. The fifth is substantive: bridging a focus on electoral (institutional) participation with one on non-electoral (non-institutional) participation.

The relative education model holds that educational attainment reflects existing socioeconomic advantages that are associated with participation rather than spurring political participation on its own. Yet, emerging research on compensation effects suggests that greater educational attainment leads to increased political engagement among more marginal populations in which political socialization is less likely to occur outside of schools. We argue that the relative education model will better describe the relationship between education and voting patterns among more advantaged groups. We test our expectations by estimating the relative education model within racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. using data from the Current Population Survey’s (CPS) Voting and Registration Supplement from 1978 to 2020. We find that for relatively highly educated White and Asian American voters, each additional year of education yields diminishing returns to turnout. For Black and Latino voters, additional years of education are positively associated with turnout regardless of relative education. The results suggest that opportunities remain to reduce racial turnout gaps and boost political participation by addressing racial gaps in educational attainment.

Mental health, like physical health, represents an important resource for participating in politics. We bring new insights from six surveys from five different countries (Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United States) that combine diversified questions on mental health problems and political participation. Unlike previous research on depression, we find only limited evidence for the Resource Hypothesis that mental health problems reduce political participation, except in the case of voting and only in some samples. Instead, we find mixed evidence that mental health problems and their comorbidity (experiencing multiple problems) are associated with increased political participation. Our study leads us to more questions than answers: are the measures available in public opinion surveys appropriate for the task? Do general survey samples adequately capture people with mental disorders? And is the assumption that poor mental health reduces political participation wrong?

What shapes the ways in which citizens participate in politics? This article investigates the association between private homeownership and the forms of citizens’ political behaviors using a Chinese nationwide social survey. Exploiting the abolishment of the welfare housing system in the late 1990s as a quasi-natural experiment, I find that owning a home and experiencing home value appreciation increases citizens’ willingness for political engagement as well as participatory behaviors through formal channels, but reduces their confrontational behaviors towards government such as participation in protests. Further evidence on political attitudes suggests that homeowners are more critical of government performance, yet they report higher political trust in the state and a stronger preference for maintaining the status quo. These findings highlight the critical role of asset ownership in preventing conflict and promoting stability by shaping the political behaviors and beliefs of citizens.

This study investigates the effects of media exposure on gender gaps in political participation in post-war Liberia. Five weeks prior to the 2011 general election, women eligible voters in randomly selected villages were provided radio sets and organized to listen to and discuss a series of elections-related programmes from a ’trusted’ United Nations radio in group settings. Results show the programme had positive effects on measures of women’s political participation, but not on men’s political behaviours, suggesting potential narrowing of gender gaps. Results also show the programme improved the quality of women’s political engagement in a way that reflected their own preferences and voting autonomy. Mediation analysis suggests that programme effects likely occurred through enhanced women’s political knowledge and efficacy and by harnessing coordination and mobilization potential of pre-existing civil society groups of a political character.

How does cognitive household labour – the ‘mental load’ involved in anticipating, fulfilling, and monitoring household needs – influence decisions about whether and how to participate in public life? Studies suggest women take on the vast majority of this load, yet the impact of these private sector inequalities on participation in public life is underexplored. To make progress on these questions, we contribute new causal evidence about the effect of prompting respondents to think about their own mental loads in a survey experiment fielded to employed British parents. Our main argument is that priming the mental load will crowd out interest in political and labour market participation. In line with expectations, our survey experiment finds a strong negative effect of mental load priming on intentions to engage in politics and at work. Our results offer new insights about the continuing relevance of household-based inequalities to gender equality in public life.

It is a long-standing view that educational institutions sustain democracy by building an engaged citizenry. However, recent scholarship has seriously questioned whether going to college increases political participation. While these studies have been ingenious in using natural experiments to credibly estimate the causal effect of college, most have produced estimates with high statistical uncertainty. I contend that college matters: I argue that, together, prior effect estimates are just as compatible with a positive effect as a null effect. Furthermore, analyzing two-panel datasets of $n \approx 10,000$ young US voters, using a well-powered difference-in-differences design, I find that attending college leads to a substantive increase in voter turnout. Importantly, these findings are consistent with the statistically uncertain but positive estimates in previous studies. This calls for updating our view of the education-participation relationship, suggesting that statistical uncertainty in prior studies may have concealed that college education has substantive civic returns.

Migrant protest activity has been often analyzed from the perspectives of the protest nature and issues it addressed. A comparison of protest behaviour before and after migration is largely missing. It remains unclear whether people who were actively protesting in their home country continue to be engaged in protests after migration and why. This article addresses this gap in the literature and aims to explain what made the Ukrainian migrants protest before leaving their home country and in Turkey as a host country. The analysis uses individual data from an original survey conducted in May 2023 among 935 Ukrainian migrants living in Turkey. The findings show that there are different migrants who participate in the protests organized in the two countries, and the strongest predictor for political protest is civic engagement. Protest in Ukraine is rooted in the orientation towards domestic politics, while protests abroad are driven by identitarian dimensions.

This essay highlights the impact of Politics & Gender on the discipline’s understanding of how gender shapes the preferences, behavior, and motivations of voters. It provides descriptive information about the prevalence of research on gender and voting in the journal, along with the proportion of articles dedicated to women voters across different regions globally. The bulk of the essay focuses on the substance of this research — drawing out major themes and identifying significant contributions within each theme — and it concludes by offering a future research agenda on gender and voting.

Recent studies suggest that online abuse directed at politicians can have negative effects on their public engagement and continued participation in politics. This article considers the broader consequences of such online abuse by testing whether exposure to online abuse of politicians also decreases the prospective political participation of ordinary citizens. In a preregistered survey experiment with 2,000 participants from Denmark, we find that exposing citizens to cases of online abuse of politicians does not have any statistically significant, or substantively meaningful, negative effects on citizens’ prospective political participation. This result holds across multiple measures of political participation and when distinguishing citizens by their gender and level of conflict avoidance. If anything, exploratory analyses indicate that online abuse of politicians may in some cases mobilize citizens who have been bystanders to such abuse.

Across the world, political parties are incorporating social movement strategies and frames. In this study, we pivot from the dominant focus on party characteristics to analyze drivers of support for movement parties in six European countries. We report results from a choice-based conjoint survey experiment showing that contrary to previous research, movement party voters favor neither candidates who are institutional outsiders nor those who actively participate in protests. Candidate policy positions are the most important driver of the vote for movement parties. Movement party voters, additionally, prefer candidates who either display anti-elitist sentiments or who want to ensure the smooth running of the current political system. These insights invite renewed attention to movement parties as an electoral vehicle whose voters prioritize decisive policy change.

What is the effect of personal discrimination on the political engagement of ethnic and racial minorities? Existing research theorizes increased engagement, but evidence is mixed. The discrimination and political engagement link is tested across six countries: Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Interest in politics and political actions (e.g. protest and donations) show constant relationships: people who have experienced discrimination have more interest in politics and take more political actions. There is no clear evidence of different effects of political vs social discrimination. However, the link between turnout and discrimination varies systematically across countries: a positive correlation in three separate American datasets, but mixed and null in other countries. This may be the result of the distinctive American conflict over voting rights for racial minorities. The conclusion discusses priorities for future research, including a focus on establishing causal relationships and testing mechanisms.

Women are globally underrepresented as political leaders; as of January 2023, only 17 countries had a woman head of government. Included in this small group is Samoa, which elected Fiame Naomi Mata’afa as its first woman prime minister in 2021 after a fiercely contested election and subsequent protracted legal disputes centered around interpretations of Samoa’s 10% gender quota. Drawing on data from the Pacific Attitudes Survey, the first large-scale, nationally representative popular political attitudes survey conducted in the Pacific region, this article examines how the political environment in Samoa shapes opportunities for women’s political participation and leadership. Using the theoretical framework of cohabitation, it finds that although there is an enabling environment for women’s participation and leadership in formal politics, women’s access to decision-making spaces more broadly is still constrained by norms of traditional leadership. This speaks to traditional and nontraditional political norms and practices that coexist, at times uneasily, alongside one another.

Political polarization has been a growing concern in Japan, particularly in recent years with the upsurge of nationalism and populism. However, little research has examined how it relates to the political behavior of the Japanese people. Using data from the 2005–2019 Japanese Electoral Studies (JES), this study shows that political polarization manifests itself in different ways depending on the specific policy domains that citizens perceive as divergent. Specifically, I discover that people who perceive higher levels of policy divergence between left- and right-wing parties on domestic and international policies are more likely to vote and participate in politics through publicly accessible networks, while there appears to be no evidence showing that perceiving high levels of policy divergence on economic issues has a meaningful effect on any type of political participation. Implications of these findings as well as directions for future research are discussed.