Understanding Patterns of Political Participation – Are National Borders Natural Borders?

Different modes of political participation are often seen as expressions of the loyalty to or discontent with the society that people live in. Institutionalized, formal participatory behaviors such as voting or petitioning are understood to signal compliance, support and trust for the political system, non-institutional behaviors such as boycotts or participation in demonstrations are understood to signal conflict and risks for social cohesion. Obviously, the likelihood that respondents report certain behaviors depends – besides respondent attributes – on the incentives and opportunities for such behaviors found in their home society. For comparative studies this means that we have to expect cross-national variation in the measurement properties of scales for political participation, even for substantive reasons alone.

This study investigates how such substantively driven heterogeneity in the measurement of protest behaviour can be dealt with, in particular in relation to methodologically driven heterogeneity of the participation measures, which may be also present and which we routinely attempt to exclude. A latent-class item response theory model for a participation scale from the European Values Study 2008 will be estimated and the outcomes analysed in terms of substantive and method-induced variation across countries.