In the last decades, political participation expanded continuously. This expansion includes activities as diverse as voting, tweeting, signing petitions, changing your social media profile, demonstrating, boycotting products, joining flash mobs, attending meetings, throwing seedbombs, and donating money. But if political participation is so diverse, how do we recognize participation when we see it? Despite the growing interest in new forms of citizen engagement in politics, there is virtually no systematic research investigating what these new and emerging forms of engagement look like, how prevalent they are in various societies, and how they fit within the broader structure of well-known participatory acts conceptually and empirically. The rapid spread of internet-based activities especially underlines the urgency to deal with such challenges. In this book, Yannis Theocharis and Jan W. van Deth put forward a systematic and unified approach to explore political participation and offer new conceptual and empirical tools with which to study it. Political Participation in a Changing World will assist both scholars and students of political behaviour to systematically study new forms of political participation without losing track of more conventional political activities.

What is the place of young people in society today? This book presents a searching and comprehensive picture of youth, demonstrating both its diversity and singularity, and helping to dispel many of the myths, discriminations, stigmas and prejudices attached to this segment of society. Drawing on a vast empirical research exercise including over 8000 interviews and 40 focus groups in eight metropolitan areas of Brazil, this book explores the most important aspects of young people's social participation and the resulting challenges for public policy. With clear resonance beyond Brazil, this research is designed to inform youth policy strategies in the developing and developed world.

Governments fail to provide the public goods needed for development when its leaders knowingly and deliberately ignore sound technical advice or are unable to follow it, despite the best of intentions, because of political constraints. This report focuses on two forces—citizen engagement and transparency—that hold the key to solving government failures by shaping how political markets function. Citizens are not only queueing at voting booths, but are also taking to the streets and using diverse media to pressure, sanction and select the leaders who wield power within government, including by entering as contenders for leadership. This political engagement can function in highly nuanced ways within the same formal institutional context and across the political spectrum, from autocracies to democracies. Unhealthy political engagement, when leaders are selected and sanctioned on the basis of their provision of private benefits rather than public goods, gives rise to government failures. The solutions to these failures lie in fostering healthy political engagement within any institutional context, and not in circumventing or suppressing it. Transparency, which is citizen access to publicly available information about the actions of those in government, and the consequences of these actions, can play a crucial role by nourishing political engagement.

This book provides you with a theoretical and comparative understanding of the major topics related to elections and voting behaviour. It explores important work taking place on new areas, whilst at the same time covering the key themes that you’ll encounter throughout your studies. Edited by three leading figures in the field, the new edition brings together an impressive range of contributors and draws on a range of cases and examples from across the world. It now includes: New chapters on authoritarian elections and regime change, and electoral integrity A chapter dedicated to voting behaviour Increased emphasis on issues relating to the economy. Comparing Democracies, Fourth Edition will remain a must-read for students and lecturers of elections and voting behaviour, comparative politics, parties, and democracy.

Youth an Politics How do young people in Europe perceive politics? How do they engage in the political realm? Which groups of young people are actively involved? And which learning environments and opportunity structures can foster parti - cipation? Furthermore methodological problems of comparative participation research are discussed and the measurement instrument that was developed in this European research project, and is certainly useful for similar studies is presented. From the Contents: Reingard Spannring, The meaning of and relationship with politics Wolfgang Gaiser, Johann de Rijke, Forms of political participation among young Europeans Sabine Westphal and Natalia Waechter, Learning for participation: family, peers, schools, voluntary organisations Ruth Picker, Gender: a female way of participation/ young women and politics Günther Ogris, The measurement instrument Johann de Rijke, Wolfgang Gaiser and Franziska Waechter, Stability of political behaviour Reingard Spannring, Günther Ogris, Wolfgang Gaiser, Conclusion

Volume numbers determined from Scope of the guidelines, p. 12-13.

The arrival of the participatory web 2.0 has been hailed by many as a media revolution, bringing with it new tools and possibilities for direct political action. Through specialised online platforms, mainstream social media or blogs, citizens in many countries are increasingly seeking to have their voices heard online, whether it is to lobby, to support or to complain about their elected representatives. Politicians, too, are adopting "new media" in specific ways, though they are often criticised for failing to seize the full potential of online tools to enter into dialogue with their electorates. Bringing together perspectives from around the world, this volume examines emerging forms of citizen participation in the face of the evolving logics of political communication, and provides a unique and original focus on the gap which exists between political uses of digital media by the politicians and by the people they represent.

This book provides a clear and comprehensive introduction to the developments which have brought about a new, global wave of inclusiveness and democracy. From Brazil to Bangladesh, a new form of participatory politics is springing up. Featuring contributions detailing how such movements have worked in Latin America, Europe and Africa, the book analyzes the impact they have had on the democratic process. By opening up the political sphere in this way, the authors contend, these grassroots movements truly have created "spaces for change."

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book investigates the reasons behind the 2017 youthquake – which saw the highest rate of youth turnout in a quarter of a century, and an unprecedented gap in youth support for Labour over the Conservative Party – from both a comparative and a theoretical perspective. It compares youth turnout and party allegiance over time and traces changes in youth political participation in the UK since the onset of the 2008 global financial crisis – from austerity, to the 2016 EU referendum, to the rise of Corbyn – up until the June 2017 General Election. The book identifies the rise of cosmopolitan values and left-leaning attitudes amongst Young Millennials, particularly students and young women. The situation in the UK is also contrasted with developments in youth participation in other established democracies, including the youthquakes inspired by Obama in the US (2008) and Trudeau in Canada (2015).

This book describes the levels of unequal electoral participation in thirty-six countries worldwide, examines possible causes of this phenomenon, and discusses its consequences.