Research on Political Participation

Political participation provides a fertile field for research. Much previous work has centered on participation in the arenas of electoral politics and has regarded participation as varying along a single dimension of costliness or difficulty. Now, however, participation is understood to involve several quite different types of activity and of activists, and also to vary according to the institutional setting in which it occurs. Attention must be given to comparisons across institutional settings and across time within specific organizational contexts. The impact of participation on the individual, the basis of so much normative argument and prescriptive advocacy, requires far more investigation.