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Conventional and unconventional political participation in times of financial crisis in the Netherlands, 2002–2012

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Abstract

In this contribution, we investigate the extent to which the recent financial crisis has affected levels of political participation in general and more particularly within privileged and underprivileged societal groups in the Netherlands. We derive competing and complementary theoretical propositions about the possible effects of the economic downturn on conventional and unconventional modes of political participation. Economic decline might mobilize people to voice their concerns in the political arena, especially via unconventional modes of political participation such as demonstrating. As privileged societal groups are more likely to participate in politics, economic decline may widen the initial differences between privileged and underprivileged societal groups in their level of political participation. We use the Dutch Parliamentary Election Studies collected before (2002–2006), at the onset of the Eurocrisis (2006–2010) and after prolonged periods of recession (2008–2012) to empirically assess these competing claims. Our results show a slight decrease in conventional modes of political participation and a slight increase in unconventional modes of political participation during the recent financial and economic crisis. We do not find that the relationship between the economic crisis and political participation changes significantly differently for privileged and underprivileged groups in the Netherlands.

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Notes

  1. Unconventional political participation has been labelled differently throughout time. One might argue that unconventional activities are increasingly accepted and regarded as ‘normal’ modes of (Dalton 2008; Lamprianou 2013; Norris et al. 2005). Thus, some of the activities such as attending a demonstration lost its ‘unconventional’ connotation. This renders the term ‘unconventional’ political participation somewhat old-fashioned. However, other labels used such as ‘extra-institutional’ participation, ‘emerging forms of political participation’, and ‘non-electoral participation’ still refer to the same political actions empirically. Thus, although labelled differently, the acts referred to when describing ‘unconventional’, ‘non-institutionalized’ or ‘protest participation’ are identical since they still refer to non-legally embedded political actions such as petitioning and demonstrating whereas conventional action still refer to legally embedded modes such as attending hearings and writing to government officials.

  2. We omitted voting out of our analyses since this is a different kind of political activity compared with the conventional and unconventional activities studied here. People vote once every few years while most of the conventional and unconventional political activities studied here, such as attending a demonstration or writing to government officials, requires more prolonged time commitments.

  3. Mokken-scale analysis has numerous advantages over more mainstream scaling methods, such as factor analyses and measurement models specified in structural equation modelling. These methods are based on the decomposition of covariances and assume that frequency distributions of the items can be regarded as ‘parallel’ and the items have more or less the same mean and standard deviation. Thus, all items need to be equally ‘popular’ to be adequately used for scaling (van Schuur 2003). Distribution of the items for political participation clearly demonstrates that this is not the case, e.g. the proportion of people who engage in political discussion on the internet, is considerably larger compared with the proportion of people who attended a demonstration.

  4. We compared a model using education as a continuous variable to a model including dummy variables for each category of education. Model 2 including dummy variables results in a slightly better model fit compared with a model including education as a continuous variable for both dependent variables (R 2 change = 0.012 with p = 0.000 for unconventional political participation and R 2 change = 0.011 with p = 0.000 for conventional political participation). However, the results including dummy variables for education, which are presented in the appendix, do not qualitatively differ from the results presented in Tables 4 and 5. For reasons of brevity and to gain statistical power, we present the parsimonious models including education as a continuous measurement.

  5. We assessed whether social class can be modelled as a pseudo-interval variable by testing to what extent the association between social class and conventional and unconventional political participation can be modelled with linear terms only. We ran model 2 including social class as a set of dummy variables and compared these to models using social class as a linear effect. No difference was found in fit between the two models (R 2 change = 0.000 with p = 0.943 and R 2 change = 0.001 with p = 0.115 for unconventional and conventional political participation, respectively).

  6. Given the ordinal and very skewed nature (most people do not participate politically), one might argue that ordered logit regression analyses is more appropriate. We compared the estimates presented here with the estimates from ordered logit models; the results did not substantially differ from OLS results, which are presented in this paper for ease of interpretation.

  7. These analyses presented here were performed on the unweighted sample. Analysis with the sample weighted according to age, gender, marital status, urbanization, region, origin, turnout (i.e.. voted in most recent parliamentary elections yes/no), and voting behaviour did not differ from the results presented here for both conventional and unconventional political participation.

  8. There is no substantial difference between the models including all missing values on each variable as separate categories and the estimates presented in Tables 4 and 5.

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Correspondence to Hans Schmeets.

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 6 and 7.

Table 6 Linear regression analysis: conventional political participation using dummy variables for level of education (n = 4, 599)
Table 7 Linear regression analysis: unconventional political participation using dummy variables for level of education (n = 4, 599)

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Linssen, R., Scheepers, P., Grotenhuis, M.t. et al. Conventional and unconventional political participation in times of financial crisis in the Netherlands, 2002–2012. Acta Polit 53, 283–304 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41269-017-0051-3

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