NEW PARTICIPATION, NEW INSTRUMENTS: THE CONSTRUCTION OF EQUIVALENT MEASURES OF POLITICAL PARTICIPATION 1

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1 1 NEW PARTICIPATION, NEW INSTRUMENTS: THE CONSTRUCTION OF EQUIVALENT MEASURES OF POLITICAL PARTICIPATION 1 Gema M. García Albacete University of Mannheim ggarciaa@mail.uni-mannheim.de Keywords: political participation, measurement, cross-cultural equivalence, scaling, Mokken Scale Analysis Gema García Albacete is a PhD candidate at the University of Mannheim, Germany. She is enrolled in the Center for Doctoral Studies in Social and Behavioral Sciences funded by the excellence initiative of the German Science Foundation. Her dissertation analyzes political participation of young people today in comparison to former generations in Europe. Her research interests include political behavior, public opinion and research methods in the social sciences. Abstract Developments in the modes and levels in which European citizens participate in politics urge for a revision of the instruments used to measure political participation in cross country comparative research. With this goal, the paper explores the latent structure of political participation by using the stochastic cumulative scale analysis procedure proposed by Robert Mokken. Applying this procedure to the pooled European Social Survey dataset shows the existence of two dimensions and therefore the opportunity to construct two scales. The first one includes actions related to the electoral process; the second one contains protest forms of participation. These two scales are tested for a large number of countries in order to find out whether the scales can be considered to establish an identity-set of actions with crossnational validity. To overcome the limitations implied in the use of identical indicators cross nationally, in the next step the identity-set is used as the basis to include national-specific items in the instruments. As a result, the final measure of 1 Comunicación preparada para el IX Congreso de la AECPA. Grupo de trabajo 4.1, La participación política no electoral: de la acción individual a los movimientos sociales, retos metodológicos y efectos políticos. Málaga, 23 a 25 de Septiembre de 2009.

2 political participation developed here combines a crossnational, identical set of indicators for all countries as well as a set of nation-specific indicators. In this way, non-identical but equivalent scales are obtained for reliable and valid measurement of political participation in cross-national research. The external validity of the scales obtained is explored by applying the measures to differences in political participation across countries. 2

3 3 Introduction 2 The development of citizens political participation in Western democracies urge for a revision of the instruments used to measure political participation in cross country comparative research. Social transformations in the forms and extent in which citizens participate have lead to a misfit between the concept of political participation and its measurement. The following changes in citizen s political involvement have been recently documented: First, the traditional distinction between conventional and unconventional participation is obsolete (Teorell, Torcal, & Montero, 2007) since involvement in what was considered unconventional or elite challenging political actions is now common place in European democracies (Topf, 1995a). Second, emerging forms of political participation have been identified, such as political consumerism and the use of new technologies with political purposes (de Vreese, 2007; Delli Carpini, 2000; Micheletti, Follesdal, & Stolle, 2004). Third, the agencies, or structures through which citizens are mobilized and participate have also been transformed with the spread of new social movements and advocacy networks (Norris, 2002). Finally, the weakness of ties to political and civic organizations has resulted in an increase of individualized patterns of participation to the detriment of collective action (Pattie, Seyd, & Whiteley, 2004). Despite these transformations and the rapid evolution and expansion of political participation research since the 1950s, the instruments used in political participation research have not been revised. Instead, researchers tend to focus on specific forms of participation electoral participation, protest activities, political consumerism, etc. usually measured by single items. This strategy can result in misleading conclusions. As an example, we can revise recent literature regarding young people political participation. While some 2 An earlier version of this paper was presented the workshop: Methodological Challenges in Cross- National Participation Research. The Hague, The Netherlands, January 2009.

4 4 studies have called the attention to their low levels of political engagement (Blais, Gidengil, & Nevitte, 2004; Pirie & Worcester, 1998;, 2000; Kay Lehman Schlozman, Verba, Brady, & Erkulwater, 1999), others have concluded that they are as involved as previous generations, but they just prefer to use new forms of participation (Dalton, 2008; Gauthier, 2003; Micheletti, Follesdal, & Stolle, 2004; O'Toole, Lister, Marsh, Jones, & McDonagh, 2003). Such contradictory conclusions are due to the emphasis on single modes of participation. However, answering questions regarding citizens political involvement needs instruments that integrate the social developments taking place. Or to put it in a different way, it requires a higher coherence between the concept of political participation which implies a broader repertoire of actions citizens can get involved in and its measure. Furthermore, comparative research poses another requirement. In order to compare political participation across countries equivalent measures, which go beyond the habitual identical measures, are needed. The degree to which citizens actually participate and their modes of participation differ according to country and context (inter alia, Anduiza, 1999; Ferrer, 2005; Kaase, 1989; Teorell, Torcal, & Montero, 2007; Topf, 1995b). For instance, compared to other European countries, participating in demonstrations is one of the most common political activities in the South of Europe. Another example is the higher degree in which citizens from Scandinavian countries get involved in associations (Morales & Geurts, 2007, p. 138). The forms political participation takes depend on the structure of opportunity and therefore, on the context. If different or non identical modes of participation are available to citizens in various countries, a comparable instrument to measure political participation should take these differences into account. Hence, the objective of this paper is to construct a measurement instrument that includes the developments in political participation and has cross-country validity. In order to do so, the latent structure of distinct forms of political

5 5 participation is explored in the following steps. The first section briefly describes some conceptual issues regarding the adequacy of considering political participation as a latent construct. Second, using the stochastic cumulative scale analysis proposed by Robert Mokken (1971) it presents the existence of two scales in which citizens can be place according to their participation across countries. The limitations involved in the use of identical measurements are addressed by searching for equivalent measures following the identity-equivalence procedure introduced by Przeworski & Teune (1966). Finally, the advantages of using equivalent measures for each country are illustrated by their application to describe political participation across countries. An explorative approach to the dimensionality of political participation Political participation research has been prolific during the last decades. Since the first studies on voting behavior, the concept of political participation has evolved and enlarged as the result of different waves of academic interest (Inglehart & Welzer, 2005; van Deth, 2001). 3 The debate on the possible definitions of political participation goes beyond the scope of this paper. From an explorative perspective, what we need is a minimum definition, or better expressed a demarcation line between political participation and the rest of human behavior as a point of departure (van Deth, 1986, p. 262). Political participation can be defined as action by ordinary citizens directed toward influencing some political outcomes (Brady, 1999, p. 737). As Teorell et al. (2007, p. 336f.) argued recently, this definition in comparison to more traditional conceptualizations allows including actions directly and indirectly aimed at influencing the authoritative allocation of values in society. We know the number of actions citizens have at their disposal to influence political decision-making is numerous (van Deth, 2001) and this repertory has broaden in the last decade (Norris, 2002). Therefore, in order to capture the whole concept of 3 See Morales (2004) or Schlozman (2002) for a review of the evolution of political participation research from the study of electoral behavior to the multidimensionality of political participation.

6 6 political participation, an appropriate instrument to measure should be able to integrate diverse political actions and modes of involvement. The next question is how the different forms relate to each other. Political participation is said to be a complex and multidimensional concept since individuals costs, motivations and consequences differ depending on the type of activity observed (Verba & Nie, 1972). Since Barnes, Kaase et al. (1979) introduced the distinction between conventional and unconventional forms of participation, it became a widely used classification for subsequent studies given its ability to cluster the variety of modes of participation and to articulate their different explanatory factors (Morales, 2004, p. 19). Therefore, the search for a measurement instrument of the concept political participation must start with an exploration of its dimensionality and the possibility of clustering the diverse activities in more than one dimension. However, the observed differences regarding the factors that explain why some people do or do not use specific modes of participation usually refer to their level or difficulty, or in other words, to the degree of individual resources (motivation, time, cognitive skills, money, etcetera) each of them requires. Already in the 1972, a latent construct of political participation, or more exactly of protest potential, allowed examining and locating individuals on an ordered continuum going from mild forms of participation to more extreme actions (Marsh, 1974;, 1977). The basic question underlying this dimension is Think about protest. Generally speaking, how far are you prepared to go? (Marsh, 1977, p. 48). Building on the idea of studying political participation as a latent continuum, an unidimensional ordered scale including both conventional and unconventional modes of participation was successfully constructed in the 1980s (van Deth, 1986). The idea of ordering different modes of action contained in the concept political participation is reinforced by the referred changes in citizens political participation. As Norris has stated (2002), while political activists could be distinguished on whether they would get involved in more institutional (or conventional) or non-institutional modes of participation in the past, political participation has evolved and the domain of political participation (or the repertoire of activities citizens have at their disposal) has enlarged. Instead of only participating in protest or institutional forms, citizens chose among the whole range of possible activities according to their resources and interest in the topic, or coming back to Marsh s concept, they will decide how far are

7 7 they prepared to go and act consequently. Summing up, transformations in the way citizens participate and former research suggest that an a priori distinction between forms of participation is not the adequate strategy for constructing a measure of political participation. Instead, the strategy followed here is to explore the latent structure of political participation. Allowing more than one dimension, the possibility of ordering diverse actions that can be considered as elements of the broad definition of political participation referred to before is examined. Strategy: examining the structure and dimensionality of the latent concept political participation using Mokken Scale Analysis (MSA) The explorative goal presented before can be articulated in the form of the following question: can the varieties of actions included in our broad concept of political participation be ordered in a meaningful way? The assumption that different actions can be ordered according to their difficulty in a single (or various) dimensions can be tested with the cumulative scale analysis procedure proposed by Robert Mokken (1971). MSA is a combination of a measurement model and a procedure that analyses each individual s pattern of responses to a set of items that are designed to be indicators of a single latent variable. 4 (PCA) 5 Contrary to other techniques such as principal components analysis or reliability analysis it includes an item parameter that shows how items differ in their distribution. The former two methods assume that the items can be regarded as parallel, i.e. having the same frequency distribution (the same mean and standard deviation). However, items differ in their frequency distribution, which makes factor analysis of dichotomous data difficult to interpret. Furthermore, the order of difficulty of the items often has an important theoretical interpretation that should be taken in account. It allows the researcher first, to investigate the dimensionality of a given data and the construction of a scale (or a number of scales) from a given pool of 4 More on MSA can be found, inter alia, in Mokken (1971) Stokman & van Schuur (1980) van Schuur (2003) and Wismeijer et al (2008). 5 See Teorell, Torcal & Montero (2007) for a recent example of an analysis of political participation dimensionality using principal components analysis.

8 8 items. It is assumed that each subject has a certain, unknown value on the latent dimension. For each item, the probability of a positive response increases with that unknown variable. In this case, it assumes that each respondent can be placed in a scale of political participation. The probability that an individual participated in a specific action i.e. attending a political rally will be higher if he or she participated in a less demanding or easier activity such as voting. Second, MSA allows a confirmatory approach, that is, the evaluation of a set of items as one cumulative scale. Therefore, we will be able to examine the properties of such a scale. As a result, to test the assumption that the diverse modes of participation can be ordered from easier to more difficult actions in a scale of political participation. Finally, it offers the possibility to test the scale (or scales) across different groups and thus, assess whether the measurement instrument is valid cross-nationally. A number of methodological arguments are behind the selection of MSA as an instrument to explore and measure the latent concept political participation. In comparison to other scaling methods (i.e. Guttman), it is probabilistic rather than deterministic. While a deterministic scale will assume that all those subjects who answered positively to a concrete item (i.e. contacted a politician) also did it for less difficult items (i.e. voting), MSA takes measurement error in account. Another advantage is its bottom-up hierarchical clustering criterion. When items do not constitute a homogeneous set of indictors of the same latent trait, most scaling and other data reduction techniques including reliability analysis and factor analysis use a top-down approach to find the best subset of indicators, first investigating the whole set and then deleting the worst item (in reliability analysis this would be the alpha if item deleted procedure). In contrast, the search strategy in MSA is a bottom-up approach, in which the homogeneity coefficient serves as the clustering criterion. Furthermore, PCA always results in a number of principal components for any set of items irrespective of whether these components are useful or not. On

9 9 the other hand, MSA is based on assumptions about trait dimensionality and relationships between items and traits. These assumptions may be supported by the data or not. The possibility of exploring the fit of the items to the latent trait and to reject some of them is therefore another advantage. Last but not least, contrary to factor analysis techniques which assume the confirmation of theoretical expectations MSA can be used in an explorative fashion. Given the changes in political participation repertories of western citizens referred before, a detail exploration of the interrelations of different modes of participation is more adequate. The procedure comprises different stages, which have been well documented before (Mokken, 1971; van Deth, 1986; van Schuur, 2003) Therefore, in the following section only some brief comments regarding the procedure will be mentioned. The expansion of high-quality data gathered in a large number of countries and for different purposes allow for the referred revision of the instruments of political participation. However, this expansion poses threats as well as opportunities for research endeavors. On the one hand, as has been stated in previous research, the growing number of actions considered as political participation and the different batteries used in survey studies implies, in van Deth s words, the risk of moving from the study of political participation towards a theory of everything (2001). On the other hand, the rich data available allows for a systematic analysis of the structure of political participation in different contexts and across time. The data selected for the application presented in this paper is the first wave of the European Social Survey collected in Following the broad definition of political participation presented before, the analysis includes a large number of items: voting, contacting politicians, working for a political party, working for other political organisation, displaying badges, signing petitions, attending lawful demonstrations, donating money, participating in illegal protest activities, media attention, discussing politics and membership in traditional political

10 10 associations (political parties and trade unions). 6 Together with these political actions, two other forms of participation are incorporated here. First, involvement in new political associations, these are: environmental, peace, humanitarian and animal rights associations. 7 Secondly, two indicators of what have been labelled emerging or new forms of participation available in the same survey battery are included: boycotting or buycotting products for ethical and political reasons. Therefore, we can account for two of the changes in participation referred before, the emergence of new forms of participation and new channels of participation such as social movements beyond traditional political institutions. Each of the items was recoded into dichotomous variables with values 1 participation and 0 no participation. In the cases of no answers, these were recoded into 0 in order to get a conservative measure including only those respondents that actually declared to have participated in each activity. 8 In comparison to other recent data sets, the ESS also includes a larger number of European countries and therefore, allows examining the cross country validity of the scales. In order to facilitate the interpretation of the results only established democracies are selected. In total seventeen countries were included. 9 The first analysis conducted is the search for one or more scales in which the diverse political actions can be ordered for all the countries pooled sample. The interactive procedure works as follows. In this first step, based on item-pair 6 The exact wording used in the questionnaire is: 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? Contacted a politician, government or local government official; worked in a political party or action group; worn or displayed a campaign badge/sticker, signed a petition; taken part in a lawful public demonstration; boycotted certain products; deliberately bought certain products for political, ethical or environmental reasons; donated money to a political organization or group; participated in illegal protest activities. 7 A single index was constructed including respondents who declared being involved (in any form) in any of the four types of associations. 8 The only exception is those who didn t have the legal age to participate in the general elections. These cases were dropped out from the dataset (2628 cases in the pooled sample). 9 The countries included are: Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, Spain, Finland, France, United Kingdom, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxemburg, The Netherlands, Norway, Portugal and Sweden.

11 11 coefficients, Hjk, item coefficients, denoted as Hj, are defined that express the degree to which an item is related to the other items in the scale. The total score coefficient, H, express the degree to which the total score accurately orders persons on the latent trait scale. It can be evaluated according to the following rule of thumb: H <.3 no scale,.3 H <.4 weak scale,.4 H <.5 medium scale and H.5 strong scale (Mokken, 1971). Negative values are in conflict with the model (rejection of the item from the scale) and usually interpreted as a sign of multidimensionality. That resulted to be the case for items such as illegal protest and voting. Other items might also be non-scalable (low Hj), for example, items such as membership in associations, media attention and discussing politics dropped out in early stages of the analysis. For the remaining items, a search for a next scale is started, and so on. The search for identical measures of the latent concept political participation Coming back to the first question posed, can the different modes of participation be ordered in a theoretical interesting way? The result of applying MSA to the pooled sample of European countries results in the existence of two scales (see Table 1). The first one includes more institutional forms of participation voting, contacting politicians, donating money and working for a political party while the second one comprises protest activities signing a petition, displaying badges, attending lawful demonstrations and participating in illegal protest activities. Some items are rejected in the analysis due to their low scalability (buycotting products, media consumption and discussing politics) or monotonicity violations (boycotting products in the second scale). The contents of the two final scales resemble to the classical distinction between conventional and unconventional modes of participation (Barnes et al., 1979) and corroborates the multidimensionality of the latent concept political participation. [Table 1]

12 12 According to the rule of thumb presented before, the resulting second scale can be evaluated as a strong scale, while the first one is only a weak scale. In both cases the reliability coefficients, measured by Rho are low (.55 and.57 respectively), which is due to the low number of actions included in each of them and the lack of a uniform distribution in their difficulties. A second step is the evaluation of the scales constructed from the pooled data sample to each country separately; do these instruments allow the ordered measurement of political participation across the seventeen countries selected? The test of the scales for each country resulted in a number of violations of the model which were solved by deleting from each scale the most problematic item (donating money in the first scale and displaying badges in the second). Each of the final scales contains three items and is a strong scale according to its scalability coefficient H (see Table 2). Only in two countries remain items that violate at least one of the assumptions of the model, these exceptions are Denmark in the first scale and the United Kingdom in the second. Nevertheless, as can be observed in tables 3 and 4, in all the remaining sixteen countries the scales are strong. However, the reliability coefficients are quite low in most of the cases, which is explained by the low number of items in each scale and the lack of a uniform distribution of the items difficulties. [Tables 2 and 3] The search for equivalent measures of the latent concept political participation The results from MSA show that the latent concept of political participation can be measured cross-nationally by means of two strong additive scales. Therefore we can construct two scales composed of identical items that allow the ordering of individuals and modes of participation across a large number of countries. However, the use of identical instruments imposes a number of weaknesses to the valid measurement of concepts cross-culturally. First, it implies a high loss

13 13 of information, since available data regarding a large number of actions taken by citizens to influence the allocation of values in society is left out. Secondly, it entails the risk of not capturing the whole concept of political participation in specific countries. In order to increase the reliability of our measures we can go beyond the use of identical instruments by constructing equivalent measures. With the same objective, the identity-equivalence procedure proposed by Prezeworski and Teune (1966) was successfully applied by van Deth (1986). By including country specific items in the already presented identical-set of indicators, longer, more reliable, and more contextually relevant instruments are acquired (Przeworski & Teune, 1966, p. 564). Equivalent measures can be constructed in this case by building on the former identical scales and testing the possible additions of the other items for each country. Departing from the identity set of items from the previous analyses, a test is conducted for each country separately. In this step the addition of each of the items not included before is tested for each country. In addition to the test of each single item, all possible combinations of items are tested. The criteria for accepting or discarding an additional item are the following. First, as in former steps, the final scalability coefficient (H) has to remain higher than.30 and it has to pose no violation to the Monotonicity model. Second, when several combinations comply with those requisites, the scale with higher reliability is selected. As can be seen in Table 4 the first scale was improved in thirteen out of the seventeen countries by the inclusion of one item (in eight of them) or two items (in five countries). Most of the resulting country specific scales are medium scales, only in three of the countries the scales can be considered weak. Furthermore, in fourteen of the countries, the inclusion of country specific items entails an increase of scales reliability. [Table 4] The second scale can be complemented with a larger number of items. In

14 14 seven of the countries, up to three extra modes of participation can be included; two items in seven countries; one item in two countries; and only in one of the countries the inclusion of any of the extra items implied a least one violation to the model. The resulting equivalent measures of protest participation are medium or strong scales, only one having an H value lower than.40 (see Table 5). Scale reliability increases in all seventeen cases after the inclusion of country specific items to the scales. [Table 5] Summing up, the application of the identity-equivalence procedure allows to integrate more available information in the scales and to improve its properties in terms of reliability. In comparison to the more limited identity sets, the new equivalent scales capture better the concept of political participation in each country. Application of the equivalent measures to describe political participation across countries and groups of the population Once obtained equivalent scales, they can be used in comparative research. Scales can be computed by adding the number of actions (items) in which each respondent has participated. Since the country specific scales differ in the number of actions they contain, the sum is standardised by dividing it by the number of items contained in each of the two scales for every country. Therefore, the resulting indicators go from 0 (respondents that did not participate in any of the actions) to 1 (those who participate in all the political activities included in the scale for their country). Figures 1 and 2 show the average involvement in each of the participatory scales across countries. The first scale allows the comparison of the average levels of involvement in institutional modes of participation (see Figure 1). Three groups of countries result from this comparison. The first one includes those with higher rates of participation: the four Scandinavian countries

15 15 included in the analysis and Belgium. The second group is formed by those countries in which participation is lower, south European countries, France and the United Kingdom. Finally, the remaining countries are located in a middle position between the former two groups. The average position of each country in the second scale, the one containing protest activities, shows a smoother distribution but still significant differences among countries. Sweden and Switzerland rank significantly higher than the rest of the countries. On the other side of the spectrum, Greece and Portugal have significant low participation in comparison to other countries (see Figure 2). [Figures 1 and 2] We now can investigate the relationship between both participatory dimensions. Each country is situated in a two-dimensional space to examine the relationship between the levels of involvement in institutional and protests activities in Figure 3. It shows that high participation in one of the types do not necessarily leads to low levels of participation in the other. Most countries cluster in the upper left quadrant of the graph which indicates that political participation in institutional modes of participation is higher than involvement in the protest participation dimension. When looking at the situation of each country in comparison to the others in a number of countries participation in both institutional and protest modes is located in the medium of the space (Austria, Luxemburg, Germany, Ireland and The Netherlands). In Sweden and Norway, participation in both types of activities is very high in comparison to other countries. In Belgium, Finland and Denmark, involvement in electoral or institutional activities is comparatively higher. The same is true in Switzerland, the United Kingdom and France with regard to protest participation. Finally, in the south of Europe (Italy, Spain, Greece and Portugal) and particularly in Greece and Portugal both participatory levels are quite low compared to other European countries. [Figure 3]

16 16 The structure of political participation, and the relationship between the two scales, can also be examined by the correlation between both scales for each country. Does the multidimensionality of the latent concept of political participation imply a conflict between the two types of participation? Or in other words, do citizens who participate in institutional activities refrain themselves from participating in non-institutional or protest activities? Figure 4 shows the correlation between institutional and non-institutional participation in seven European countries. Grey bars represent Pearson correlations using the European Social Survey. In the seven countries, the relationship is positive and statistically significant, ranging from the lowest in Finland (.17) to the highest in Italy (.48). Therefore, we can confirm that both dimensions of the latent concept of political participation are strongly related to each other 10. In addition, we can examine the evolution of political participation structure. The black bars in Figure 4 contain the replication of the former analysis with data from the Political Action Study, collected in the late seventies. 11 It confirms again the positive relationship between both dimensions. Furthermore, the comparison of both points in time shows the relationship is stronger nowadays in almost all countries (with the exception of Finland). Therefore we find evidence of the stated enlargement of citizens participatory repertories. The probability that an individual participates both in Institutional and Noninstitutional political actions in higher now than in the seventies. [Figure 4] Finally, the scales constructed can be used to investigate the levels of participation of different groups of the population. For instance, how do participation in Institutional and Non-institutional activities change with age? Or more specifically, does the relationship between age and political participation still conform to the curvilinear shape found in former studies? In 10 The same conclusion can be reached when analyzing seventeen countries. 11 It must be noted here that a former analysis of the structure of political participation using the Political Action Study showed a one-dimension structure excluding voting was more adequate in the seventies (van Deth, 1986) However, for illustrative purposes, the scales constructed here replicate the same structure found in the present study with the European Social Survey.

17 17 order not to impose a functional form to the data, locally weighted polynomial regression is used to explore the trend in political participation across age. LOWESS smoothing scatter plots are presented in Figures 5 and 6, showing that the relationship between involvement in political activities and age confirms the expected pattern. Despite to a different extent in each country, participation in institutional activities presents an inverted U shape. It increases with age until reaching a peak between 40 and 50 years old, when it gradually decreases. However, in Belgium and United Kingdom it remains stable with aging (see Figure 5). On its part, participation in non-institutional modes, in general, is higher among younger citizens and starts decreasing at an earlier age (see Figure 6). It also presents higher variation in patterns, which comes as no surprise if we take into account that protest activities are more influenced by the context and therefore, period effects. [Figure 5 and 6] Conclusion This paper departed from two challenges in comparative political participation research. First, departing from the need to integrate societal developments such as the expansion of the participatory repertories citizens have available into measurement instruments, it has been shown how the enlarged number of political actions can be ordered according to their difficulty in two different scales with good scalability properties. The broad definition of political participation used permitted an explorative approach to examine the structure of the latent construct political participation and resulted successful in identified two different dimensions, one containing activities related to elections and involvement in traditional institutions and the second one comprising protest actions. The second challenge identified is the existence of country specific modes of participation. In order to ensure the comparability of political participation

18 18 cross culturally the search for measurement instruments must go beyond identical stimuli and come up with equivalent measures. Following the identityequivalence procedure introduced by Przeworski & Teune resulted in an improvement of the scales in both theoretical and methodological aspects. It allowed the construction of longer, and thus more reliable and contextually relevant measures. The final measure of political participation developed here combines a cross-national, identical set of indicators for all countries as well as a set of nation-specific indicators. Finally, the comparison of the average levels of participation for each country clearly shows the applicability of the equivalent scales for cross national comparative research. Countries can be situated in a two-dimensional space of political participation to examine the extent and the form in which their citizens get involved in politics in comparison to other European countries. In addition, a preliminary analysis of the relation between both dimensions of political participation has shown a strong correlation among them. Furthermore, some other ways in which the scales can be used to investigate political participation patterns and changes have been shown.

19 References 19

20 20 Table 1: Characteristics of the two scales constructed from the pooled data set: items included, their frequency and scalability coefficients. First scale Second scale H.34 H.44 Rho.55 Rho.57 Items contained Mean Item H Items contained Mean Item H Voting Signing a petition Contacting politicians Displaying badges Donating money Attending lawful demonstrations Working for a political party Illegal protest activities Note. Data base used is the first round of the European Social Survey. Table 2: Characteristics of the two cross-country identity scales constructed: Items included, their frequency and scalability coefficients. First scale Second scale H.53 H.57 Rho.43 Rho.50 Items contained Mean Item H Items contained Mean Item H Voting Signing a petition Contacting politicians Attending lawful demonstrations Working for a political party Illegal protest activities Note. Data base used is the first round of the European Social Survey.

21 21 Table 3: Testing identity set scales across countries. Sample First scale Second scale Model violations H Rho Model violations Pooled sample Austria Belgium Switzerland Germany Denmark Monotonicity Spain Finland France United Kingdom Monotonicity Greece Ireland Italy Luxemburg Netherlands Norway Portugal Sweden Note. Data base used is the first round of the European Social Survey. Figures show the scalability (H) and reliability (Rho) coefficients resulting of testing the two scales for each country sample.

22 22 Table 4: Items included and properties of the final equivalent first scales in each country. Sample Austria Belgium Switzerland Germany Denmark Spain Finland France UK Greece Ireland Italy Luxemburg Netherlands Norway Portugal Sweden H a Rho a Members traditional orgz. Donating money Traditional orgz. + donating money.53/.65 x --.39/.46.43/.43 x x x x.45/.52 x.41/.45.40/.50 x x.53/.56 x x x.43/.56.40/.46.38/.41.50/.53 x.40/.42.40/.42.64/.57.39/.48.58/.57.38/.48.40/.45 x.53/.54 x x x -- x.39/.52 x x.36/.49 x.47/.58 x.47/.54 x x x.48/.60 x H b Rho b Note. H a and Rho a represent, respectively, the scalability and reliability coefficients of the identical scale for that country. H b and Rho b are the same coefficients for the final equivalent scale. The remaining figures represent the scalability (H) / reliability (Rho) coefficients resulting of the addition of each item or combination of items in the scale and for each country. The cells highlighted in grey indicate the item or combination of items added in the final equivalent scales.

23 23 Table 5: Items included and properties of the final equivalent second scales in each country. Sample Austria Belgium Switzerland Germany Denmark Spain Finland France United Greece Ireland Italy Luxemburg Netherlands Norway Portugal Sweden Kingdom H Rho Newtype x.39/.53 x x x x x x x x.40/.51 x x x x x x Badges.45.40/.51.50/.55.52/.57.45/.51.66/.74 x.58/.67 x x.52/.60.60/.70 x.46/.48.40/.48.42/.63.51/.50 Boycott.38.43/.55.42/.52 x x.58/.70.33/.48.47/.62.42/.49.38/.59.49/.57.53/.66.35/.55.46/.51.38/.46.45/.60.38/.47 Buycott x x.39/.52 x.37/.46.50/.67 x.45/.60 x x.43/.56.55/.66 x.39/.52 x.37/.61.40/.47 Newtype + badges x.37/ x x x x x x x.40/.58 x x x x x x Newtype + boycott x.40/ x x x x x x x.38/.58 x x x x x x Newtype + buycott x.39/ x x x x x x x.37/.61 x x x x x x Badges + boycott.41/.60 x.42/.57 x x.56/.74 x.47/.66.42/.55.35/.61.43/.61.51/.72 x.43/.55 x.40/.66.39/.54 Badges + buycott x.39/.59 x x.38/.50 x x.45/.65 x.37/.66.42/.61.52/.72 x.40/.56 x x.42/.52 Boycott + buycott x.44/.65.45/.61 x x.53/.74 x.45/.71 x.40/.69.46/.66.55/.66.35/.60.46/.62 x.41/.65.42/.56 Badges + boycott + buycott x.40/.67.45/.64.58/.60 x.51/.74 x.45/.73 x x.43/.68 x x.44/.62 x x.43/.60 Newtype + badges + boycott x.38/ x x x x x x x.37/.63 x x x x x x Newtype + badges + buycott x.38/ x x x x x x x.38/.65 x x x x x x Newtype + boycott + buycott x x -- x x x x x x x.39/.67 x x x x x x H Rho Note. H a and Rho a represent, respectively, the scalability and reliability coefficients of the identical scale for that country. H b and Rho b are the same coefficients for the final equivalent scale. The remaining figures represent the scalability (H) / reliability (Rho) coefficients resulting of the addition of each item or combination of items in the scale and for each country. The cells highlighted in grey indicate the item or combination of items added in the final equivalent scales.

24 24 Figure 1: Average participation in Institutional activities in seventeen European countries. Figure 2: Average participation in Non-institutional activities in seventeen European countries.

25 25 Figure 3: Levels of institutionalized and protest participation in seventeen European countries. Scale 1: Institutional Participation Greece Portugal Denmark Norway Finland Belgium Spain Italy Austria Netherlands Ireland Luxembourg Switzerland Germany United Kingdom France Sweden Scale 2: Non-institutional Participation Figure 4: Pearson correlation between Institutional and Noninstitutional political participation in seven European countries and two points in time. Austria Britain Finland Germany Italy The Netherlands Switzerland Political Action Study (1977) European Social Survey (2000) Note. All correlations are significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed). 25

26 26 Figure 5: Participation in Institutional activities across age in seventeen European countries. Lowess smoother Belgium Switzerland Germany Denmark Spain Finland France United Kingdom Greece Ireland Italy Luxembourg Netherlands Norway Portugal Sweden Scale1: Institutional participation.5 1 Austria Age bandwidth =.3 Source: European Social Survey ( ) Figure 6: Participation in Non-institutional activities across age in seventeen European countries. Lowess smoother Belgium Switzerland Germany Denmark Spain Finland France United Kingdom Greece Ireland Italy Luxembourg Netherlands Norway Sweden.5 1 Portugal 40 0 Scale 2: Non-institutional participation 1 Austria Age bandwidth =.3 Source: European Social Survey ( )