SHIFTING INEQUALITIES: Patterns of exclusion and inclusion in emerging forms of political participation

Recent research has found a steady increase in the number of people involved in emerging forms of civic engagement that take place outside of the institutionalized sphere of politics, such as Internet campaigns, ad hoc protests, political consumerism, and lifestyle politics (Bennett 1998; Norris 2002; Inglehart and Catterberg 2003; Micheletti 2003; Cain et al.2004; Dalton 2004, 2008; Stolle and Hooghe 2005; Stolle et al.2005; Zukin et al.2006; Micheletti and Stolle 2009). The argument is put forth that citizens today, especially younger generations, seem to prefer participating in the extra-parliamentary realm, in non-hierarchical and informal networks, and in a variety of sporadic campaigns that are not institutionalized. These forms of political participation have been originally emphasized by authors like Barnes and Kaase (1979), who highlighted the distinction between conventional and non-conventional forms of participation. However, currently ‘unconventional’ forms have become so popular and mainstream that the label has been rendered nearly meaningless (Inglehart and Catterberg 2003). In acknowledgement of the rising trend and in line with the literature we call these action repertoires emerging forms of political participation.

Yet criticism has emerged about these emerging non-institutionalized forms of participation (van Deth 2009). Most importantly for the purpose of this article, their growing popularity forces scholars to re-evaluate the existing social stratification of political action repertoires. Critics claim that emerging action repertoires generate even stronger patterns of persistent inequalities than conventional forms of participation (Verba et al.1995; Skocpol 2003: 223ff.), excluding a large part of the population from broad-based participation. This criticism about stratification in political participation builds upon the well-known phenomenon of the ‘participation paradox’: the more intensive a form of political participation is, in terms of the skills, time, energy and resources involved, the more skewed its distribution across the population becomes (Verba et al.1995). Since most of these expansions of the participation repertoires require a substantive amount of cognitive skills and material resources, it is plausible that the participation paradox might lead to more unequal outcomes for these emerging action repertoires than would be the case for conventional or institutionalized participation acts. Similarly, Dalton (2000: 930) posits that as a shift towards less conventional forms of participation occurs, participation rates might increase on the whole, but may decrease among people of a lower socioeconomic status because they lack the political skills and personal resources required of newer action methods. Theda Skocpol's (2004) main concern is that as these emerging action repertoires are accessible only to an elite part of the population they actually strengthen existing inequalities: ‘Variety and voice have surely been enhanced in the new American civic universe forged by the organizing upsurge of the 1960s to the 1990s. But the gains in voice and public leverage have mainly accrued to the top tiers of US society – while Americans who are not wealthy or higher-educated now have fewer associations representing their values and interests, and enjoy dwindling opportunities for active participation’ (Skocpol 2004: 14).

However, before any conclusions can be drawn about the potential of these extra-parliamentary action repertoires and the inequalities they might engender we need to examine the participation paradox cross-nationally and over time. Is the rise in emerging forms of participation related to stronger socio-demographic stratification patterns than conventional forms of participation in major Western democracies? How did stratification patterns across various participation types develop over time?

We first discuss the stratification problem and apply it to participation patterns over time. The following section is empirical in nature. The patterns of exclusion and inclusion of emerging action repertoires across countries as well as over time are examined in juxtaposition to conventional forms of participation. We close with some speculation about the democratic potential of these emerging forms of participation.

Earlier research has shown that emerging forms of political participation are indeed rising over time (Inglehart 1997; Inglehart and Catterberg 2004; Stolle et al.2005; Forno and Ceccarini 2006; Dalton 2008). Furthermore, the concept can be empirically distinguished from conventional or institutionalized forms of participation (Sabucedo and Arce 1991; Marien et al.2010). While various theoretical explanations of why and how these forms of participation emerged have been put forth (Beck 1992; Inglehart 1997; Warren 2002; Holzer and Sørensen 2003) the lack of solid empirical research regarding their potential inequalities still presents a significant problem. The important question of this investigation deals with the patterns of stratification and inclusion in these political acts. Given the well-known bias in various forms of political participation, we ask whether these patterns of stratification persist, or even become stronger in these emerging engagement repertoires in major Western democracies.

The study of inequality and stratification in political participation is not new at all. Verba et al. (1995) have extensively studied both the substantive and demographic inequality in various forms of political participation. In a nutshell, there is a widespread demographic though not much of a substantive inequality in participation. Wealthier, more educated people, males and older generations are more active in conventional forms of political participation in the US (with the exception of voting). Rarely has research studied political inequality beyond the US and in the context of emerging forms. Some new research efforts suggest that the original assumptions about political participation being less stratified outside of the US cannot be confirmed. The initial assumption was that some European democracies achieve a more egalitarian pattern of involvement because political institutions such as trade unions and political parties offer the resources necessary for high levels of participation (Verba et al. 1979). Yet recent analyses revealed that European democracies also deal with a rising inequality gap, particularly for voting (Kittilson 2005a; Gallego 2007), which is attributed to the diminishing importance of equalizing institutions such as unions and churches (Kittilson 2005b). However, rarely have studies directly compared the inequality of various types of action repertoires including the emerging forms (see exceptions in Gallego 2007; Marien et al.2010); and there is no study that looks at how stratification in different types of participation develops over time.

Interestingly, two divergent hypotheses shape up when thinking about how unequally spread emerging forms of participation are. On the one hand, most traditional forms of participation are linked to organizations and institutions, offering a steady supply of resources, networks and opportunities for political action and influence (Verba et al.1979). Although these organizations and institutions are in decline, we still expect them to play an important role in mobilization processes. Most of the emerging forms, on the other hand, are by definition disconnected from well-established institutions and thus without the helping organizational umbrella that provides information, skills and incentives for political mobilization (Verba et al.1995). This might imply that they require more resources and skills from the participants to compensate for the missing institutional framework, a difficulty that can be compounded by the growth in the number of political venues that exist to address different political issues (Warren 2002). For instance, education, political knowledge and cognitive skills are required for the assessment of the various product labels in stores or for current political events that trigger petition drives. As a consequence, education levels might still influence those who participate in emerging forms of political action. Education has a strong positive effect on the development of civic skills that are required to engage in various forms of participation in an effective manner.

Some empirical proof for this expectation has been offered in previous research. Verba et al. (1995) have shown, for example, that check-book activism is heavily dominated by the richest segment of the population, and that this inequality is stronger than for traditional forms of participation. Skocpol (2003), too, has expressed concern about the fact that the professionalization of political activism could lead to more privileged political access and influence for the wealthiest groups of the population. Of course, emerging forms of participation go way beyond pure check-book memberships, but the question arises as to how inclusive these democratic practices actually are (Young 2002).

Other authors, however, have put forward the claim that emerging political action repertoires actually weaken patterns of stratification, considering that they have the potential to promote more direct citizen engagement in politics and place a greater emphasis upon including resource-poor social groups in decision-making processes (Gaventa 2002). The importance of socio-economic resources such as education might diminish for forms of participation that are more sporadic and less time and energy-consuming: for example, the entry costs for signing a petition are lower than for becoming an active member of a political party. Similarly, it certainly requires fewer resources to forward a political email than to attend meetings of a political organization. In order to be engaged politically, people no longer need to have the time to regularly attend meetings, and they do not need selective group or leadership skills. Overall, one can assume that these emerging action repertoires are practiced more sporadically than conventional forms. This new and less taxing approach to expressing political views and stances with regard to time and energy might thus facilitate a broader recruitment of citizens from diverse and non-traditional backgrounds. Mobilization into emerging action repertoires seems more widely accessible, as displayed through the Internet and other informal mobilization mechanisms (Jennings and Andersen 2003). In sum, with regard to the stratification of the practice of these action repertoires based on socio-economic resources, particularly education, our hypothesis remains open, as two opposing assumptions exist in the social science literature emphasizing different aspects of the resources needed for participation, suggesting that emerging forms might exhibit stronger or weaker levels of inequality compared to conventional forms. Looking at the spread of stratification over time, we would assume that particularly conventional forms of participation exhibit higher levels of educational inequality because they are most affected by the increasing disappearance of the mobilizing institutions of the church, unions, and political parties.

Another form of stratification is expressed in the gender gap in political participation. Whereas gender gaps for voting have closed in several countries (Conway 2001), they remain in place for several other conventional activities, even for working informally to deal with a community problem, making campaign contributions, contacting public officials, and affiliation with political organizations (Verba et al.1995). For emerging forms of participation, we expect less of a gender gap, since these activities allow for the merging of public and private spheres and they relate closely to everyday life activities which are more conducive for women's involvement (Lowndes 2000). Whether it is about the choice of products in the supermarket, lifestyle decisions such as vegetarianism or the fight for animal rights more generally, or signing petitions, many of these activities are closely related to the areas of life in which women are at least equally or more active than men. It thus seems plausible that women are at least equally if not disproportionately drawn towards these emerging participation types compared to men.¹

Considering changes in gender stratification over time, we expect both conventional and emerging forms to exhibit more gender equality over time. Again, as resources play an important role in political participation, it is clear that women have gained such resources over the last decades through their increased entry into the labor force. Moreover, higher professional positions allow for the practice and learning of civic skills through activities undertaken on the job, such as organizing meetings, giving presentations, and the like that can be transported to the political realm (Schlozman et al.1999). Since women have gained increasingly higher level positions at work, and generally higher recognition in society we expect this to spill over into the political realm. Thus, in our second part of the gender hypothesis it is expected that the gender gap diminishes for both forms of participation, but eventually is smaller for emerging forms because of their everyday character.

The final dimension of participatory bias to be examined in this article is age. Scholars who write about the decline in political participation expect that the young generation has tuned out of conventional forms of political participation, ranging from voting, to party membership, joining other groups, to contacting politicians and attending group meetings (Putnam 2000; Macedo et al.2005). Similarly, older people are seen as a ‘civic generation’, which is frequently and eagerly involved in political acts. On the other hand, critics of this perspective put forth that the young generation is engaged disproportionately in various emerging forms that have been overlooked, and which the elderly have not taken up (O'Toole et al. 2003). The characteristics of emerging forms, and particularly their low entry costs, the sporadic nature of these forms, young people's familiarity with the Internet, and their openness to lifestyle politics, such as the wearing of specific clothes, stickers or buttons, allows for easier recruitment of younger age groups into these action repertoires. However, older generations are also expected to adopt emerging repertoires over time as they become more mainstream, and are easily available political tools for everyone. So, while generally emerging action repertoires are likely dominated by the younger generations, in a time period comparison we would expect younger people to disproportionately drop out of conventional forms; and we would expect increasing age equality in emerging forms over time.

The overall task of this article then is to assess these expectations, and thus the validity of the criticisms charged against emerging action repertoires to ask whether participation in them is indeed more heavily skewed than in traditional participation repertoires and how this stratification has changed over time.

The question about the evolution of social stratification of emerging participation vis-à-vis conventional forms can only be solved using longitudinal data sets that reach back at least a couple of decades. In addition, the inequality in action repertoires has to be tested in several countries at the same time to ensure that the relationships are not an artefact of a specific cultural or institutional context. Therefore, two general conditions guide our choice in data sets: (a) longitudinal availability of items that measure non-institutional action repertoires in comparison to institutional forms; and (b) the cross-national availability of these items. The very nature of these emerging action repertoires, defined by irregularity and spontaneity, has made it difficult for researchers to capture the phenomenon beyond case studies. We too have encountered this problem. The compromise then is to rely on the select few items that have been included in cross-national surveys, such as boycotting and the signing of petitions. These acts used to be labelled as unconventional, since they are not related to formal political organizations or institutions.

The surveys should also contain the socio-demographic variables which allow us to understand the inequalities inherent in these participation forms. Since no one data set can answer all of these questions, we will have to rely on the data sources that are currently available. The comparison between the countries included in the Political Action data set from the early 1970s (Barnes and Kaase 1979) and the European Social Survey (ESS) (2002), with its large political action battery, are the most useful. This selection allows for an analysis of the participation questions posed in a number of Western European countries and the US, over several decades, and for a number of participation acts. Extreme care should be taken, however, since sampling procedures and the wording of various items have changed slightly since the early 1970s. In the Political Action Survey, no time frame was included, whereas in the ESS the question was asked regarding activities in the previous 12 months. In addition, in the 1974 Political Action Survey, the exact question was: ‘Are you willing to join boycotts?’ with as first answer category: ‘I have done this’. All the other answering possibilities ventured into the possibility that the respondent might consider taking part in this kind of action and were excluded from this analysis. In the ESS/CID survey, the question was asked in the following way: ‘There are different ways of trying to improve things in [country] or help prevent things from going wrong. During the last 12 months, have you done any of the following?’ The answer options were just ‘Yes’ or ‘No’, where a ‘Yes’ answer counted as having done the activity. By selecting the ‘Having done this’ category in the Political Action Survey, we use very similar question wordings in both surveys, as both surveys question actual behavior. If anything though, the surveys for the later time point estimate a more conservative account of participation in these action repertoires, as they attach a time frame to their survey questions (e.g., actions performed in the last 12 months). For some of these acts, we will further substantiate our findings by relying on the results of the Dutch Elections Studies, conducted in The Netherlands from 1971 onwards (see below).

In sum, our data sources include:

• 1.

  The Political Action dataset that was collected in eight nations in the early 1970s.²

• 2.

  The results from the first and second wave of the European Social Survey (ESS), conducted in 2002 and 2004–2005,³ combined with the CID survey for the United States.⁴ For the analysis we utilize the original eight countries that also participated in the Political Action Survey.

• 3.

  Dutch Elections Studies, 1971–1998⁵ is one of the few longitudinal data sources which includes broad batteries of political action.

In this section, we examine whether the rise of emerging types of engagement is linked to a changing distribution of participation within the population (Verba 2003). We particularly examine biases for gender, education, and age as these are strong and persistent sources of stratification with regard to political participation (Verba et al.1995).⁶ The analysis proceeds in several steps. First, we present a bivariate comparison of stratification patterns in emerging and conventional action repertoires in two points in time, namely in 1974 and 2002 for a number of countries for which we have comparative data. These include the participant countries in the Political Action Survey such as Austria, Finland, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, The Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United States. In a second step, a multiple regression test of stratification in the two time periods is performed across participation types. Finally, the Dutch election studies data set is used to conduct a longitudinal test of changing inequalities within one data set.

Education has emerged as a basic and ubiquitous form of stratification. Verba et al. (1995: 334 ff.) found that education is one of the strongest predictors of all forms of political participation. How do emerging political action repertoires change the education bias for political participation?

In Figure 1 relative participation scores which were normalized to the participation level of the lowest education group are presented, meaning that the activity level of the lowest educational groups is set to 1, and the higher educational groups are compared to this level. So, for example, for the most unequal form of participation of boycotting in the 1970s the figure shows that the highest educational group is nearly five times as engaged in boycotting as the lowest educational group. The results in Figure 1 demonstrate that education is an influential factor for almost every form of political action in the 1970s. This is particularly true for boycotts and protest politics, which back then were some of the newest forms of participation. Protesting in the 1970s also showed significant signs of stratification as it was practiced nearly four times as frequently by the group with the highest education level, in comparison to groups with the lowest. In 2002, education still drives participation in the emerging action repertoires, but as we can see to a lesser extent. With regard to taking part in demonstrations and boycotts we observe somewhat of a mainstreaming effect: while in the early 1970s these were typical activities for the highly educated, in 2002 stratification with regard to demonstrating is basically the same as with regard to other forms of participation. This indicates that demonstrations and rallies today include a more widespread segment of the population and have come to be ‘normalized’ (Norris et al.2005). In addition, boycotts show a more reduced educational curve, while highly educated people are still 2.6 times more likely to practice this form of political consumerism than are the less educated. This result confirms other research showing how political consumerism preserves an educational bias (Stolle et al.2005). These results suggest that both institutionalized and emerging forms of political participation require resources like cognitive skills that are provided in the education process. The sporadic and potentially less time-consuming nature of emerging forms of participation does not overcome the typical educational stratification in political participation.

In sum, emerging forms of participation do not diminish the inequalities between participants regarding education levels. On the other hand, and contrary to some of the more pessimistic assumptions, they do not strengthen inequalities either. Instead the educational inequalities are there, but in a slightly more dampened form than in the 1970s. The pessimism in the work of Skocpol and other authors, therefore, does not seem to be completely warranted by the evidence presented here.

Women are an obvious group that is mobilized through emerging forms of participation. Figure 2 shows shifting gender inequalities measured in relative gender gaps (in relation to men) in boycotts and for signing petitions using data from the 1974 Political Action Survey and the 2002 ESS combined with the US CID survey. Three emerging activities – boycotting, signing petitions and protesting – as well as three conventional political action repertoires – voting, contacting a politician, and party membership – were chosen here for the graph which shows relative gender gaps and indicates the extent to which women are more or less engaged than men in a selected activity. So, for example, whereas in 1974 women were about 23 percent less engaged in boycotting than men, by 2002 this has completely shifted around, and now women are 14 percent more engaged than men in this activity.

It is quite striking to observe that the emerging actions (as compared to the institutionalized ones) in the second time point seem to be gender-neutral, and, at least with regard to political consumerism and the signing of petitions, are actually being practiced more often by women now. As Figure 2 demonstrates, the acts of signing petitions, boycotting and demonstrations all started out with the typical 1970s gender gap, with women up to 60 percent less involved in protesting compared to men. Yet now the gender gap has been either reversed (as in the case of boycotting and petitions) or has declined drastically (as in the case of protests). For acts that clearly show a downward trend according to the literature (party membership, contacting a politician etc.), on the other hand, the traditional gender gap diminished only to a degree. In fact, party membership and contacting politicians have not only declined in the general population, but they have also remained predominantly male activities with relative gender gaps of 42 and 28 percent, respectively, in 2002.

Other analyses confirm this finding. In 10 out of 16 Western European countries included in the World Values Survey, the gender gap for boycotting decreased steadily and was reversed in some Scandinavian countries (results not shown). For the usually unmeasured activity of ‘buycotting’ (i.e., deliberately buying products for ethical or political reasons), women's engagement vis-à-vis men's is even stronger, which is indicated by an analysis of the 2002 ESS: in all countries but Spain more women are involved in buycotting than men (results not shown). In sum, some emerging forms of participation mobilize and include groups of the population (in this case women) that have been previously (e.g., in conventional participation forms) excluded altogether, or at least included disproportionately.

Age is another factor that biases forms of political participation. It is particularly important to understand which forms are more inclusive for younger people, as scholarly views clash here as to how engaged young people have become over time. Older generations have been praised for their generous level of engagement. Given our previous discussions we would expect that young citizens are more drawn toward emerging forms of participation, more than three decades ago, and in contrast to older citizens who we expect to engage disproportionately in traditional forms.

Our expectations have been confirmed in most regards. Back in the early 1970s the youngest age groups of 15–30 years were often the ones experimenting with new forms of political participation (new at the time). For example, the youngest were 3.5 times more likely to protest than the oldest age group (over 60) and more than twice as likely to boycott. For voting and membership in political parties, older age groups were more engaged: a pattern that also holds for the year 2002. In fact, all institutionalized political acts in 2002 show a very large age bias; for party membership or for contacting a politician, older age groups are involved almost twice as often as the youngest people. But at the same time the youngest citizens clearly take the lead in protesting. Contrary to our expectations, the middle age group is now the most active with regard to boycotts and the signing of petitions, showing the typical curvilinear patterns of the influence of age on participation. One interpretation of these findings is to take a generational view and to assume that we are perhaps witnessing the ageing of the ‘protest generation’ (Jennings 1987). Those who initialized demonstrations, petitions, and boycotts back in the early 1970s are also those who continue to use this form of participation in the contemporary period, while the present youth cohort seems less eager to engage in these action repertoires (Figure 3). It might be that in comparison to older generations, younger ones are either tuned out altogether or engage in other so far unmeasured forms of political participation (e.g., Internet participation). An answer to this question goes beyond the scope of this paper.

In sum, emerging action repertoires have the tendency to engage young people disproportionately as long as they remain new and innovative. Over time, these repertoires are taken over by middle age groups, and the same curvilinear effect of age on participation dominates the analysis as has been the case before with conventional participation.

Thus far, various biases have been examined one by one: education, gender, and age. These bivariate explorations are useful for detecting trends of stratification. Moreover, the relative scores indicate trends independent of the rise or decline in selected participatory repertoires. Yet these relationships need to be tested in a multiple regression model for a better understanding of inequalities in a cross-national context. Since the focus in this article is on determining the significant changes between 1974 and 2002, we had to limit the analysis to political acts that were measured in an equivalent manner in the two surveys. Two models are presented, with the following as dependent variables:

• 1.

  Taking part in emerging participation acts (signing petitions, participating in boycotts and in demonstrations).

• 2.

  Taking part in conventional participation acts (contacting politicians and party membership).

In both cases, the dependent variable is dichotomous: having participated in one or all of these acts, or not, which implies the use of binary logistic regression as the method of analysis. As independent variables, we include the most important forms of stratification, i.e., gender, age and education levels as well as all country dummies. All cases are weighted equally per country in order to ensure that large sample countries do not dominate the analyses.

The results from this multiple regression analysis, presented in Table 1, largely confirm our bivariate exploration of the data. For education we do not observe meaningful differences between the 1974 and the 2002 results, indicating that the lower and medium education groups are consistently less engaged in both forms of participation than are the high education groups. Also, younger age groups are more engaged in emerging forms of participation in both points in time, just as they are clearly less engaged in conventional acts. This was most significant in 2002. There is an interesting reversal for the 31–45 age group. Whereas they had practiced more institutionalized politics in 1974 than the oldest age group, in 2002 this difference has been reversed, suggesting that there are clear generational effects. The 46–60 age group appears to be the most engaged in conventional acts throughout the two time periods.

The strongest difference between the analyses of the two surveys emerges for gender. For institutionalized forms of participation, the gender gap remains significant in the two points in time. For the emerging participation acts, the gender gap in 2002 is reversed, with women now significantly more active than men in these acts such as signing petitions, and joining boycotts and protests. More specifically, women now have 13 percent higher odds of being engaged in the emerging action repertoires when compared to men. From earlier analyses we know that this relationship is mostly driven by boycotts and signing petitions. Table 1 

Although comparing the biases in two data sets, which are about 30 years apart and contain similar but not identical measurements, constitutes an important test, the ultimate analysis should utilize a longitudinal data set. The problem is that such data sets are not readily available. It appears that only the Dutch elections studies included the emerging forms of participation found already in the 1970s, right until the currently available data of 1998. The availability of a reliable time series for The Netherlands allows for an analysis that includes interaction effects of the socio-economic variables that measure potential biases and the year of the survey, such that changes over time can be revealed in a robust manner.

The Dutch data set has a few limitations: it only contains two emerging forms of political participation, specifically, the signing of petitions and protest participation. In addition, of the two conventional political acts only data regarding party membership were available. The other disadvantage is that it can only help to test the propositions in a one-country setting. Nevertheless, a separate analysis of the Dutch Political Action and ESS data reveals that The Netherlands does not diverge from the patterns found in other Western democracies.

In a first set of regression models, we include the year of the survey, as well as gender, education and age as categorical variables, whereas the second set of models include interaction terms between the year of the survey, and gender, education and age. The interaction terms were included separately for better interpretation; they indicate whether any of the biases in gender, education and age have strengthened or weakened over time.⁷ This analysis was conducted for the two available emerging forms (see first four columns) and repeated for party membership (see last four columns). The results from the Dutch longitudinal analysis largely confirm our earlier findings. Both Models 1 in Table 2 indicate that the year of the survey is positively related to the emerging forms of participation and negatively related to party membership, and in both cases significantly. This confirms the trends that were established using real-life data on the frequency of demonstrations and party membership in The Netherlands (SCP 2004) as well as previous findings about the rise of emerging forms and the decline of conventional political acts (Norris 2000; Stolle et al.2005). For the other independent variables as well, our initial findings are confirmed, and the results hold with various formulations of the models (e.g., also when including variables such as political interest, etc.). Younger people are overrepresented in petition signing and demonstrating: the age group of 31–45 year olds is 2.1 times as likely to be engaged in emerging actions in comparison to the oldest age group. As expected, for party membership the relation is strongly reversed; the youngest here are far less engaged in political parties than are the older generations. Education remains a strong source of stratification for all forms of participation. Models 1 also show that there is an overall gender gap for both types of political participation in The Netherlands when examining the pooled surveys, though the coefficient for emerging forms is admittedly smaller.

Subsequently in Models 2, an interaction effect with the year of the survey is added in order to detect significant changes of inequality over time. Both Models 2 in Table 2 include the interaction term between gender and survey year (coded with 0 for 1971; 1 for 1972 and so on). As expected, the interaction term is positive and significant for the emerging forms of participation, offering a confirmation of our initial finding that gender inequalities have been diminishing in a significant manner in this area of participation. In fact, the gender gaps have reversed over time, whereas no such reversal is observed for the conventional activity of party membership. This result is in line with the results of the cross-national analysis presented earlier. The political parties in The Netherlands, apparently, were not able to attract more female members than they did three decades ago. However, protesting and signing of petitions is drawing more females into political action over time.

In both Models 3, the interaction effect between the two lowest educational groups and survey year is not significant, confirming the bivariate analyses presented earlier, and indicating that the stratification along education does not change significantly over time. Finally, for Models 4 the interaction terms with the two medium age variables show a positive sign and are statistically significant for emerging forms, which means that over the years these forms have been increasingly taken up by these middle age groups. This again could be an indication of the ageing of the protest generation and is certainly a mainstreaming of the emerging acts. There is no such interaction with the oldest generation, however, which was tested in a separate model with the youngest generation as a reference category. There is also no change in the importance of age over time for party membership. This analysis of longitudinal data, therefore, clearly confirms the conclusions that could be drawn from the comparison between the datasets from the 1970s and the early 2000s.

Emerging action repertoires are currently practiced more broadly and widely than many of the institutionalized acts ever were, with the notable exception of voting. Our main question was: how does this transition affect the stratification that is so prevalent in citizen political action? Conventional action repertoires reflect the common biases which remain fairly consistent over time –they involve more men than women, they require more education, and they also are practiced more by older age groups compared to younger ones. In contrast, emerging action repertoires seem to attract participants of a somewhat different socio-demographic background. Most strikingly, these new participation forms have partially integrated formerly excluded groups, like women, and they remain open to young age groups, although older middle age groups have now taken the lead. Indeed a large chunk of this rise can be explained by the increasing involvement of women in the emerging action repertoires. In fact, for emerging forms of political participation the gender gap has even been reversed, with women being more active in boycotts and petitions than men. For institutionalized acts, on the other hand, the traditional gender gap is still present and has not substantially changed over time. The conclusion here, then, is that the inequalities with regard to gender have been reduced substantially through the emerging forms of political action but not through conventional political acts.

However, emerging action repertoires remain exclusive for the lowly educated. Education is highly significant both for conventional and emerging acts; this is true for both 1974 and 2002. The analysis of the Dutch longitudinal data confirms that educational equalities have not substantially increased nor decreased for both types of political action. Finally, age inequalities are most predominant for conventional political acts. Indeed it is striking to observe how the younger age groups withdraw from party and institutionalized politics more readily than was the case in 1974, and even more so in comparison to the older age groups. Older groups are excluded from the emerging repertoires, while the groups aged between 31 and 60 have gained ground. The youngest group, aged 15–30, have come to be extremely disengaged from conventional politics; but their engagement in emerging repertoires has not increased over time. Overall, emerging action repertoires have opened more ways of engagement for the younger cohorts, and can be seen therefore as more inclusive with regard to age as well.

In general, the emerging political action repertoires are certainly not more exclusive than the conventional political action repertoires have been, and in fact their potential for less bias has already been proven with regard to gender and, to a degree, with regard to age. While we do not want to downplay the importance of other forms of political stratification, it is striking that the erosion of gender inequality, which is one of the most persistent forms of inequality, has not received due attention within the political science literature. Nevertheless, it seems clear that the entry of a new cohort of female political participants is relevant, not just from an equality perspective, but also because it has redefined the way politics is being practiced in contemporary democracy.

However, we should also add that there might be another dimension of equality that needs further attention. Those who practice emerging forms might be also more engaged in conventional political acts further compounding the strong stratification already inherent in any form of political action. In fact, in 2002 those who have engaged in emerging repertoires are nearly four times as likely to be a party member and over two times as likely to have contacted a politician. These double inequalities are certainly posing a limit to the egalitarian potential of emerging repertoires.

Our analysis of these emerging action repertoires has shown that these political acts challenge current definitions of political participation as they stretch the boundaries of the public and private spheres because they are practiced in a non-institutionalized and sporadic manner, and consequently target many different power-holders beyond national governments. The question arises as to the democratic consequences of this transformation. Will citizens’ voices be heard as much as with the use of conventional political tools? Or will their non-institutionalized, sporadic and individualized character prevent the transmission of political goals? Can ad hoc and short-lived mobilization campaigns sustain important issues that citizens want to push? How effective are these emerging tools with regard to the way citizens can influence the policy-making process? Many such questions remain open in the study of emerging action repertoires. What we do know, however, is that contrary to some pessimistic assumptions, this shift has not led to an increase in political inequality on major socio-demographic dimensions.

Dietlind Stolle is an Associate Professor of Political Science at McGill University and an affiliated researcher at the Department of Political Science at Stockholm University. Her research interests include the concepts of social capital, diversity, political participation and political consumerism.

Marc Hooghe is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Leuven (Belgium) and a visiting professor at the University of Lille-II (France). He holds PhDs in Political Science and Sociology, and he works mainly on political participation and social capital.