Has anything challenged or changed your understanding of democratic participation over the past year? If so, what?
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One thing that has increasingly challenged our understanding of democratic participation is the tension between participation as a democratic ideal and participation as a conflictual and unequal social process. From a social movement perspective, this tension is hardly new: protest and contentious politics remind us precisely that democratic participation often emerges because institutional channels are perceived as insufficient, inaccessible or unable to represent particular demands. What has become increasingly evident to us, however, is how difficult it is to evaluate participation independently from the social and political conditions under which it takes place.
Looking at protest since the pandemic has reinforced the importance of asking not simply whether citizens participate, but who is able to participate, whose claims become visible, which actors are recognized as legitimate, and whose participation actually produces political consequences. Opportunities for participation remain unequally distributed, as do organizational resources, access to institutions and the capacity to attract public attention. Participation can therefore reproduce existing power relations even when it appears open and horizontal.
At the same time, the post-pandemic protest landscape complicates any straightforward normative equation between participation and democratization. Mobilization can articulate demands for social justice, recognition and democratic inclusion, but it can also express exclusionary identities, conspiracy narratives or explicitly anti-democratic positions. Rather than seeing this as a reason to distrust protest, I think it reinforces a classical insight from social movement research: conflict is constitutive of democracy, but its democratic consequences cannot be assumed in advance.
Our research has also made us reflect more critically about visibility as a political resource. Most protests are not directly experienced by most citizens. They become socially and politically meaningful through processes of mediation. News organizations, social media platforms and movements themselves participate in selecting, framing and circulating particular representations of contention. Understanding democratic participation therefore also requires understanding the unequal struggles over who gets to define what a protest is, what it is about, and whether its claims are considered legitimate.
One thing that has become apparent over the course of the last year, as colleagues and I have examined inequalities in political participation, is the scope of political disengagement across a range of participation modalities. While our analysis to date is based on observational data and so can only point to correlations, it is striking to see that specific social groups, the less well off, with lower educational attainment, in economically precarious positions, whose news consumption is limited and who fell powerless are most likely to be disengaged. The reasons for their disengagement are rooted in socio-economic, cultural as well as political circumstances. Some issues, however, such as healthcare, climate change and socio-economic inequality have the potential to rekindle their participation. Fundamentally, the issue of disengagement is highly salient in as far as it reflects on the legitimacy and stability of democratic systems.