| Issues of political participation and policy responsiveness have been a central concern in theories of democratic representation. Scholars have historically viewed the former as essential in guaranteeing the latter. That is, citizen participation is thought to be a primary mechanism by which officials are held accountable to mass preferences. More recently, scholars have started to focus on how these issues affect political equality. In particular, researchers have begun to examine how differences between social groups in their levels of participation provide differential incentives for responding to mass policy preferences. The chief worry is that low levels of participation among some groups may disadvantage their ability to be heard politically. In this dissertation, I further investigate these themes by examining three related questions. First, how have levels of political participation changed over time? Second, how have group differences in political participation changed over time? Third, to what extent are over-time trends in political participation characterized by cross-national variation? Multivariate analyses suggest a few noteworthy findings. First, participation in an array of political activities has largely increased over the past two-plus decades. Activities such as voting, demonstrating, boycotting, and discussing politics have experienced impressive upward trends since the 1980s. Second, this upward trajectory has occurred in a variety of democratic contexts, including social, liberal, and corporatist democracies. Third, despite improvements in aggregate levels of participation, group differences in participation have remained remarkably persistent. These findings suggest that while democratic accountability may be improving over time, political inequality has largely endured. |
