Political participation
Is political participation in Europe increasing, declining, or simply changing?Over the years, the word of voter apathy, of people getting tired of politics, consistently has gone round in the media. It is argued that voter abstention proves that politics today is too complex, and too inflexible to find consensus on radical standpoints. In March 2003, however, we could witness the largest scale mass public demonstrations ever seen in many West European countries. In many capitals and major cities across Europe, millions of people went on the streets to demonstrate against the Iraq invasion. In face of these millions of politically concerned people, can the argument of political disinterest still stand?In the following essay, I will first define the term political participation. Then, I will debate in what ways participation is indeed declining, but also in what ways it is increasing. In my conclusion, I will assert that people do not participate any less than they used to. Nowadays, they simply partake in the political process in many different ways.Political participation is the active involvement of the people in the political process of decision-making. This is a fundamental principle of democracies. The free access t
I have shown that in stable European democracies, the easiest form of political participation, the vote, is in decline for numerous reasons, whereas other forms of participation like pressure groups or international movements are becoming more successful and effective. The easiest way to politically participate is voting. The organization of both cause groups and supranational movements has been aided by the proliferation of technology through people's lives (Heywood 2002: 285). Citizens also engage in cause groups, which promote an idea or goal not directly connected to material interests of their members. ), Basingstoke: PalgraveKopstein, J. Most famously, it reached worldwide recognition at the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) summit in Seattle, when it successfully disturbed the convention's flow (known as "Battle of Seattle"). An example for this is Europe's biggest trade union, ver. 41% said they had boycotted products for the same reasons. Even wearing a badge or a sticker, signing a petition or donating money to support a group constitutes political participation. In the last fifty years, electoral participation has indeed been falling. Traditional forms of political participation like membership in trade unions remain popular; these long established pressure groups live on the fact that they are so-called insider groups, they enjoy "regular and privileged (. (2002), Individual Characteristics, Institutional Incentives and Electoral Abstention in Western Europe, European Journal of Political Research 41(5) pp. Contrarily, there are extra-institutional forms of participation like membership in pressure groups (PG) or social movements, organizations which I shall explain below.
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Acceptance Essays
