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From theory to practice: how to apply van Deth’s conceptual map in empirical political participation research

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Abstract

In a time when digitally networked and unconventional activities challenge our understanding of political participation, van Deth (Acta Polit 49(3):349–367, 2014) has developed a map to consolidate previous attempts at conceptualizing political participation. He suggests a framework operating with four distinct types of political participation that apply across time and context and therefore potentially may lead to higher comparability of results in participation research. However, his map faced criticism for not accounting for digital and other recent participatory activities, and so far, it remains a theoretical endeavor that needs to prove its utility when applied to the diverse set of participatory activities. Our study empirically tests how recently emerging participatory activities, such as crowdfunding or urban gardening, can conceptually be combined with more traditional forms of participation. We use 27 participatory activities from a national survey conducted in Denmark (N = 9125) to test van Deth’s framework. A confirmatory factor analysis demonstrates the existence of four distinct types of political participation, based on the sphere, the target, and the intention of activities. Our model furthermore indicates that the distinction between online and offline activities has decreased in relevance and that new and unconventional participation activities can be subsumed under van Deth’s four types of political participation.

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Notes

  1. Theocharis mentions the example of “tweeting a picture of oneself with the hashtag #Dontshoot in the realm of the shootings in Ferguson in 2014” (2015, p. 8). Knowing the image content, the specific hashtag and the cause, Theocharis classifies this action as a type of targeted participation (PP II or III). Interestingly, in a footnote (p. 11) Theocharis mentions another interpretation, namely that the same activity may well be a specimen of PP IV because “the act does not itself directly target politics or government, or a problem or community.”

  2. We agree with Hooghe et al. (2014) that political decision-making processes have changed, but even though a target is moving, it remains the same target. Therefore, decision-making processes can be an important distinction criterion in the conceptualization by helping to capture a broader participation repertoire to ‘hit moving targets’ within the political sphere.

  3. Further examples are being in a court of lay assessors (if done voluntarily) or participating in petitions or referendums (if state-initiated).

  4. The pollster recruits panelists on several hundred Danish web pages (Pfeiffer and Garrett 2014; Baker et al. 2010). Approximately 30% of the selected respondents agreed to become panelists.

  5. Of the 13,700 people, 1700 were as well recruited via the pollster’s database.

  6. Items surveyed but not assigned were:

    Liked posts […] on social media sites about a political or societal issue; Checked into political events on […] social media sites are expressions of preferences, but not action (Theocharis 2015).

    Helping neighbors (e.g., watching their house) does not address a collective problem or concern but is an individual help situation (Van Deth 2014);

    Read political posts on social media; read blogs that cover political or societal issues; visited a website or social media site of a politician, political party, public authorities, or NGO; and attended a public political discussion, debate, or lecture are neither happening in nor are they targeted at the political system.

  7. To check for the robustness of our model fit, we repeated the analysis only on the sample of the Danish population (n = 4641), excluding the population of oversampled young and elderly citizens. The model fit for this sample was equally high: (χ 2 (203) = 1916.663, p < .001, RMSEA = 0.46, CFI = .950, TLI = .942, WRMR = 2.4).

  8. The WRMR did not fully meet the fit criteria. The use of categorical (voting) and continuous (all other) measures in the model may account for this anomaly, although the use of differently scaled items within the same model is a known procedure for CFA (Yu 2002).

  9. For better comparability, the estimates of the latent variables were fixed to a maximum of 1. The highest estimates for the latent variables were as follows: voting in a national election (PP I); signing online petitions and contacting a politician via email or social media (PP II); participation in a meeting about concerns in one’s local area and volunteering in a local organization such as an urban garden (PP III); sharing posts about political or societal issues on social media; and expressing one’s own political opinion on such platforms (PP IV).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark

    Jakob Ohme & Erik Albæk

  2. University of Amsterdam, 1012 WX, Amsterdam, Netherlands

    Claes H. de Vreese

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  1. Jakob Ohme
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Ohme, J., de Vreese, C.H. & Albæk, E. From theory to practice: how to apply van Deth’s conceptual map in empirical political participation research. Acta Polit 53, 367–390 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41269-017-0056-y

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