Political Participation — Its Meaning and General Development

Political participation by private citizens is unrenouncable for modern democracies. Not only is participation through established channels a feature by which governments gain legitimacy within representative political systems and therefore necessary in a functional way. Political participation also serves some normative aspects of democratic theory. In political, sociological, and philosophical discourses, democracy is seen not merely as a type of political regime, but as a way of life (for an overview, see Klein/Schmalz-Bruns 1997). This point was already stressed some decades ago, when first signs of the participatory revolution (Kaase 1984) were becoming visible. In his plea for the “Active Society” (1968), Amitai Etzioni describes the necessity of people’s “self-control” 1 of their own and their community’s lives. And self-control demands active participation, interference. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.