Participation and Representation in the Digital Age (PRD)
Professor Jennifer Oser gives a talk in the framework of the EUI Interdisciplinary Research Cluster 'Transnational Democracy in the 21st Century'. To find out more about the cluster and its activities, please visit our website https://www.eui.eu/research-hub?id=tr...
This presentation addresses the question of how people incorporate increasingly prevalent nonelectoral political acts into individual-level repertoires of participation; and how well represented these different types of political participators are. At a time of growing concern about unequal representation in democracies, two conflicting global trends over the last several decades highlight the importance of these questions: a clear decline in voter turnout, especially among lower status groups; and evidence of increased nonelectoral participation, especially among higher status groups. To assess how these trends in political participation affect patterns of representation, the presented theoretical framework integrates new approaches for investigating the links between individuals' participation repertoires (i.e., how individuals combine voting, protest, online activism) and objective and subjective representational outcomes. The presentation draws on a new ERC Starting project on "Participation and Representation in the Digital Age." In addition to providing an overview of the project's research design, the seminar will include preliminary findings on several of the project’s planned work packages.