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ECPR Standing Group on Participation and Mobilization
Member projects
• Caught in the Act of Protest: Contextualizing Contestation
• Community Contracts Pilots Programme – An Evaluation
• Conference: The Dynamics of Citizenship in the Post-Political World
• Contentious Dynamics and Urban Change
• The End of Contentious Participation? Exploring the Governance of Change in the Northern Milan
• MYPLACE: Memory, Youth, Political Legacy and Civic Engagement
• PARTIREP: Changing patterns of participation and representation in contemporary democracies
• Processes Influencing Democratic Ownership and Participation (PIDOP)
• The research network DEL on Electronic Democracy
• SOMUS - Social Media for Citizens and Public Sector Collaboration
Caught in the Act of Protest: Contextualizing Contestation
This project's principal aim is to create an international inter-university network of research teams interested in collective action and protest surveying.
The central tenet of this study is that a specific national context generates a specific mobilizing context; that the interaction of nation and mobilizing context produces a specific type of demonstration; that a specific type of demonstration brings a specific group of protestors into the streets. We assume that the composition of the group of protestors, their motives and the way they are mobilized result from the interaction of national context, mobilizing context, and type of demonstration (see Figure).
Participating countries
• Belgium
• Italy
• Spain
• Sweden
Community Contracts Pilots Programme – An Evaluation
K. Purdam, R. Askew, A. Harding, L. Richardson, J. Rees and G. Squires, Cathie marsh Centre for Census and Survey Research, University of Manchester.
Funder: Department for Communities and Local Government, Nov 2008 - Mar 2009.
Community Contracts are voluntary agreements between local people and town halls that will allow residents to set minimum standards, bargain with councils for extra services and put in place checks on quality. Community Contracts are intended to give residents and communities the opportunity to agree deals and written guarantees with their council on a wide range of service standards from tackling drug dealing on estates, bin collection, clearing graffiti and street cleaning.
The Centre for Census and Survey Research and the Institute for Political and Economic Governance at the University of Manchester are conducting an evaluation of the Community Contracts pilots programme on behalf of the Department of Communities and Local Government.
Methodology: a review and analysis of locally held quantitative data; six selected in-depth case studies (each of which will include interviews with stakeholders, a residents focus group and targeted ‘vox pop’ interviews with residents). In addition, we will host a practitioner event to test our evaluation findings. The research brings together a team of experts in local governance, public services, neighbourhood working and community engagement.
Contact Details: Email: kingsley.purdam@manchester.ac.uk.
Conference: The Dynamics of Citizenship in the Post-Political World
Department of Political Science, Stockholm University, will host the conference "The Dynamics of Citizenship in the Post-Political World" May 26-28, 2009. Read more »
Contentious Dynamics and Urban Change
Tommaso Vitale (Università degli Studi di Milano Bicocca)
Scholarly literature tends to show how the urban conflicts that surface in European cities are more and more defined by strong segmentation and fragmentation. The conflicts are no longer structured and miss well defined social groups as references, like in the instance of the protest cycle of blue-collars that spread in Europe from 1965 to 1977. Urban mobilizations underwent deep change since the end of the seventies due to the weakening of Keynesian welfare policies and the extensive spreading of neo-liberal policies. Some claims of the urban movements were accepted pushing many organizations to evolve into agencies involved in projects of urban renovation and fighting against social exclusion. While this general dynamic led to a shrinking of contentious spaces, conflicts have not vanished from European cities: they rather fragmented and ground around new issues, sometimes with a certain continuity. The research will collect and compare urban contention cases in Northern Italy. The main objective is try to understand mechanisms and processes of urban change and inertia connected with local contentious dynamics. Also issues of political innovation will be addressed.
The End of Contentious Participation? Exploring the Governance of Change in the Northern Milan
Coordinated by Simone Tosi e Tommaso Vitale – Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca (simone.tosi@unimib.it; tommaso.vitale@unimib.it)
Keywords: participation, élite; industrial restructuring; community studies; growth machine; urban regime.
Aim of the research project is the analysis of the local governance of the transformations occurred in the last two decades in an area – the Alto Milanese, in Lombardy – characterized by a strong industrial history, and currently experimenting a deep crisis phase. The research is funded by Fondazione Inizative Sociali Canegratesi. The research design can be asked to tommaso.vitale@unimib.it . The research team is composed by: Alberta Giorgi, Emanuele Polizzi, Enrico Claps, Giulia Cordella, Simone Tosi and Tommaso Vitale dell’Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca; Loris Caruso dell’Università di Torino; Cristina Tajani e Francesco Samoré dell’Università degli Studi di Milano; Laura Centemeri del Centro de Estudos Sociais – Coimbra; Mauro Migliavacca del CNR-Istituto di Ricerche sulla Popolazione e le Politiche Sociali; Michela Barbot dell’Università Commerciale L. Bocconi; Daniele Pennati del Politecnico di Milano.
Linkage Mechanisms between Citizens and the State. Consequence of Changing Value Patterns and Expanding Participation Repertoires
ERC Advanced Grant 2011. Prof. Marc Hooghe
The relation between citizens and the state has been transformed dramatically in previous decades. Structural forms of linkage, like party membership, partisan identities and institutionalized forms of participation (e.g., voting) are in decline, while in a number of countries, political trust too has eroded. Citizens, clearly, have become much more critical toward the political system. Research has shown, however, that this decline does not amount to an alienation of citizens from the political system, as non-institutionalized forms of participation and levels of political interest clearly are not caught in this downward spiral.
This project starts from the concept ‘linkage’, to summarize the attitudinal and behavioral network of relations between citizens and the state, and the interaction between these components. Based on the insights of the traditional ‘civic culture’ literature, it is ascertained what consequences these emerging linkage mechanisms might have on the future stability of liberal democracy in Western societies. The assumption is that linkage can only be effective if citizens have access to sufficient opportunities to communicate to the political system and if they have mechanisms available to get their voice heard in the political decision making process. In the various work packages of the project we investigate the behavioral and electoral consequences of political trust, the stratification and the effectiveness of non-institutionalized forms of political participation and the interrelation between participation and attitudinal orientations toward the political system. The guiding research question of the project is what are the most likely consequences of changing value patterns and expanding participation repertoires for the functioning of liberal democracy. To a large extent, the empirical work packages are built on survey methods, fully exploiting the availability of recent comparative datasets. This is important, since we can assume that linkage patterns are country-specific, and comparative research therefore is essential if we want to detect general patterns. This also allows us to ascertain whether the process of European integration has a specific effect on political trust within the member states of the European Union.
In addition we rely on case studies, interviews, content analysis and experimental methods. This project strongly builds on previous research efforts of our research unit, with the aim to arrive a theoretically founded synthesis of empirical findings. The findings of the project are theoretically informed, but they should provide also insights with regard to the stability of liberal democratic political systems.
MYPLACE: Memory, Youth, Political Legacy and Civic Engagement
MYPLACE explores how young people’s social participation is shaped by the shadows (past, present and future) of totalitarianism and populism in Europe. The project brings together a consortium of 16 research institutions from 14 European countries. The project-coordinator is Professor Hillary Pilkington from the University of Warwick. Mariona Ferrer-Fons (Political and Social Sciences Department, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona) participates as a team leader for Spain in the European project MYPLACE.
Funder: MYPLACE is a 7.9 Million Euro European Commission (7FP) funded project, which runs from June 1st 2011-31 May 2015.
The project investigates how young people’s social participation is shaped by the shadows of totalitarianism and populism in Europe. The specific objectives of MYPLACE are:
1. To contextualise young people’s civic engagement in regional, national and European historical contexts
2. To map and understand the process of the (re-)production, transmission and (re)interpretation of local, national and pan-European political heritage and experience
3. To measure attitudes to, and participation, in political organisations, social movements and civic action programmes among young people in Europe and to understand how these attitudes and engagements are differentiated along lines of gender, ethnicity, class and region
4. To measure views on legitimate forms of political representation and action within the context of different democratic heritages
5. To map the range of youth activism across Europe and the ways in which young activists are networked inter-regionally and trans-nationally
6. To understand the appeal of radical, extreme or populist movements to young people and its relationship to regional, national and European political heritage.
7. To inform and assist policy and practitioner agencies to chart and evaluate the political responses to populism in the youth related policies of political parties and within young people's own activism
Empirically, MYPLACE employs a combination of survey, interview and ethnographic research instruments to provide new, pan-European data that not only measure levels of participation but capture the meanings young people attach to it.
PARTIREP: Changing patterns of participation and representation in contemporary democracies
Promotors IAP project: Prof. Kris Deschouwer (VUB), Prof. Pascal Delwit (ULB), Prof. Marc Hooghe (KU Leuven), Prof. Stefaan Walgrave (UA).
PARTIREP is an Interuniversity Attraction Pole (IAP) funded by the Belgian Science Policy. It involves the universities of Antwerp (UA), Brussels (VUB and ULB), Leiden (Universiteit Leiden), and Leuven (KU Leuven). The main research question for this project is how the processes of participation and representation are being affected by social changes, and in turn, what effect participation and representation patterns have on the legitimacy of democratic government. Within this project we look at citizens (participation, attitudes), at political parties (organization, strategies), at other intermediary organizations (media, social movements) and at political decision-makers (role perception, links with society). This multi-facetted research is broken down in several smaller projects or work packages. Within this project we conduct a pre- and post-electoral (population) survey (panel) for the regional elections in Belgium (2009) and an international survey of members of national and regional parliaments (2009-2010).
Processes Influencing Democratic Ownership and Participation (PIDOP)
PIDOP is a multinational research project funded by the European Commission under the Seventh Framework Programme. The project is examining the processes which influence civic and political participation in eight European states – Belgium, Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Sweden, Turkey and the UK.
The project is drawing on the disciplines of Psychology, Politics, Sociology, Anthropology, Social Policy and Education. It is examining macro-level contextual factors (including historical, political, electoral, economic and policy factors), proximal social factors (including familial, educational and media factors) and psychological factors (including motivational, cognitive, attitudinal and identity factors) which facilitate and/or inhibit civic and political participation.
More information about the project can be found at its website: http://www.psy.surrey.ac.uk/PIDOP/
The research network DEL on Electronic Democracy
The network offers a great service for people working in the field of Internet & Politics, with frequent e-mail information about calls for papers, research projects, publications, sources of financing etc.
If you wish to register to the network, please send an e-mail to Stéphanie Wojcik (stephanie.wojcik@univ-paris12.fr), as well as your name, institutional affiliation, e-mail address, topics of interest and/or short abstract of your research work, short list of publications. Read more »
Save our school! What kinds of impact have protests against school closures in Swedish local politics?
Katrin Uba’s new project has just received funding from The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation (Riksbankens Jubileumsfond). It will start 2010 and last 3 years.
Abstract: Citizens´ opposition to closing of public schools is nothing new in Sweden, but recently it has spread from rural areas to suburbs and become more visible. Some of such campaigns succeed in stopping or postponing the closure, while other actions fail and pupils are sent to new school. As the consequences of school closures are shown to be negative for pupils, teachers, and the local community, it is interesting to know how and in what conditions some local groups succeed in stopping the closure. As the democratic principles suggest that citizens should have equal opportunities for participation and influence in political decision-making, it is important to ask whether protesting in rich, urban or native- Swedes dominated areas is more successful than the struggle in poor or immigrant dominated communities? Does it matter who participate in such actions and what kinds of strategies they use? This project will answer these questions by using and developing further the theories of social movement outcomes. These refer to the importance of local municipal power-relations and socio-economic situation of a municipality. The empirical analysis uses data on all Swedish municipalities that have discussed the question of school-closure during the last twenty years. The quantitative analysis will be complemented with a few case-studies for exploring the mechanism of citizens´ impact on decision- making in Swedish municipalities.
SOMUS - Social Media for Citizens and Public Sector Collaboration (Finland)
SOMUS research project 2009-2010 is a consortium project of Technical Research Centre of Finland (vtt.fi), University of Jyväskylä (jyu.fi), University of Tampere (uta.fi) and Helsinki University of Technology (tkk.fi). It is funded by Academy of Finland (aka.fi).
The SOMUS project in Finland will create new understanding of citizenship, publicity and participation in decision-making in the era of social media. Open, citizen-driven media must support the different phases of participation: public definition of common problems, collection and accumulation of knowledge and other competencies, development of socially grounded innovations, and actual decision-making. Some of the innovative features of the project is to make all the procedures openly and transparently on the Internet (from meeting agendas to software development) with social media including wiki and Qaiku microchannel.
The project created a mashup competition - Apps for Democracy Finland - for the international MindTrek'09 conference for getting new concepts from the citizens how to remix and recycle public governmental and communal data streams (like GPS data, rss, statistics, maps). The new forms of participation, citizen-driven media concepts and self-organizing networks will be studied by designing, testing and evaluating web and mobile services that collect, develop and re-distribute information drawn from public sector data resources, mass media outlets and the social networks of citizens. These mashup services will be developed within three case studies that are named Participatory media, Immigrant media and Instant media.
States of freely associating citizens: cross-national studies into the impact of state institutions on social, civic, and political participation
Dissertation by Tom van der Meer, available for order by contacting t.van.der.meer@scp.nl.
Citizens participate in many spheres of society: in informal networks of family and friends (social participation), in voluntary associations (civic participation), and in the sphere of politics (political participation). Interestingly, there are large differences across countries. For instance, Italians and Spaniards visit their extended family twice as often as Americans and Danes. In Scandinavia and the Netherlands more than 80% of the citizens are a member of at least one voluntary association, whereas this is approximately 20% in Poland and Greece. With regards to political participation, turnout at national elections is much higher in continental countries like Belgium and Luxembourg than in Anglosaxon countries like the United States.
What causes these differences? Why do citizens participate differently in various countries? This book aims to explain these differences in participation by studying state institutions as determinants of citizens’ participation. It offers a comprehensive overview and systematic test of different ways in which state institutions are related to social, civic, and political participation. Hypotheses are deduced from rivaling actor-centered institutionalist theories and tested on recent, high-quality cross-national data sets, using hierarchical modeling.
These analyses show that state institutions do indeed matter. State institutions stimulate social and civic participation by offering collective resources (like social security and civil rights), and reduce participatory inequality within countries by redistributing individual resources (like time and money). State institutions stimulate political participation by raising the incentives to participate through decisive elections and high political stakes. Finally, democratic rule stimulates the relationships between social, civic, and political participation: these relationships are stronger in longstanding democracies than in newly established democracies.
Sustainable Citizenship
The project Sustainable Citizenship studies the barriers to and opportunities for sustainable action on the part of individual consumers in Sweden. This choice of subject matter is motivated by research showing the importance of consumer behavior as a key factor behind climate change, the role of private consumption in perpetrating environmental and social injustices, and the general problems that governments and civil society have had in convincing individuals to exercise constraint in their consumer practices (IPCC 2007; Cultures of Consumption 2007; Spargaaren 2006; Dobson 2004; Berglund & Matti 2006; Princen et al. 2002). “Barriers to action” have been found to inhibit the incorporation of the tenets of sustainable development in important common practices like shopping for oneself and one’s family in high-income countries (Hobson 2003).
The project investigates how individual citizens think about sustainable development in relation to private consumption and if concerns for sustainable development affect their consumer choices and practices. Its general research questions are:
(1) Do Swedish citizens have the necessary prerequisites to be sustainable consumers?
(2) Do they think about the consequences of their consumer choices and practices for sustainable development?
(3) Do they exercise sustainable judgment in their consumer choices and practices?
(4) Why/why not is this the case?
Last update: December 20, 2011
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