What are the effects of campaigns of coercive social mobilization on political attitudes? We show that such policies can strengthen authoritarian regimes by altering citizens’ patterns of trust. From 1968 to 1978, 16–17 million Chinese teenagers were “sent-down” to labor in rural areas, where they lived without their families under difficult conditions. Using a regression discontinuity design to account for selection into being sent-down, we show that former sent-down students are more critical of local government performance compared to their counterparts, yet they are less critical of the national government and generally more supportive of the regime. We see no significant differences in political participation, though there is some suggestive evidence that the sent-down students are more likely to favor officially sanctioned political activities. These results appear to stem from the close social control and isolation from family associated with the sent-down experience.

Discriminatory encounters are commonplace for Muslims living in the West. How do these experiences impact the political behaviors of Muslims within these societies? Scholars have examined the effects of Islamophobia on Muslims’ civic engagement and found mixed results. Some researchers argue that discrimination triggers demobilizing psychological processes, while others contend that discriminatory experiences motivate active citizenship as a corrective to injustice. Still others suggest that distinct experiences with discrimination mobilize differently. This article engages with original survey data from Canada, France, Germany, the UK, and the US to explore whether and how individual experiences with societal and political discrimination, and perceptions of group discrimination, influence Muslims’ political activities. It reveals that societal, political, and group discrimination are associated with greater breadth of mainstream political activities, while experiences with political discrimination and perceptions of group discrimination correlate with protest activities. These results suggest that Muslims discern the specific nature of discriminatory experiences and respond accordingly through democratic means.

This article advances the concept of deliberative campaigns as a structured, cyclical and party-integrated process to reinvigorate democratic systems under strain from exclusion, polarization and disengagement. Deliberative campaigns embed ongoing, reciprocal deliberation between citizens and representatives throughout and beyond election cycles, making party platform creation a continuous, participatory endeavor. Drawing on the systemic approach to democracy, the article argues that deliberative campaigns uniquely combine deliberation, representation and voting to better address empowered inclusion, collective will formation and collective decision-making. Unlike conventional campaigns, which tend toward elite-driven, one-sided communication and microtargeting, deliberative campaigns foster informed, inclusive dialogue that can rebuild trust, reduce polarization and enhance accountability. The approach offers both theoretical and practical contributions to democratic systems scholarship by showing how institutionalizing citizen–representative dialogue can create platforms that more faithfully represent collective priorities and strengthen responsiveness in partisan democratic politics.

Can political activism foster electoral participation? We investigate this question by examining the role of the British suffragists in fostering women’s electoral participation. While scholars have shown that women politicians increase women’s participation in politics, less attention has been paid to the role of activists. We fill this gap by studying the 1913 Pilgrimage, a large-scale nationwide march in support of women’s parliamentary suffrage. Using a novel database of geocoded electoral registers, we employ a differences-in-differences strategy to show that proximity to the Pilgrimage increased women’s registration in local elections. To explain this effect, we show that exposure to women activists spurred other women’s political mobilization, and that our results are not driven by an endogenous selection of the march path and cannot be attributed to mobilization by other movements or politicians. Our findings highlight that women’s activism can drive political participation even in the virtual absence of women politicians.

Much of the existing behavioral political science literature ignores Black motherhood as a salient factor of political identity and mobilization. However, Black mothers are often at the forefront of numerous political movements, including ones to end police violence against Black Americans. Due to the disproportionality of police contact in Black communities, Black mothers have a personal stake in ending police abuse that is twofold. First, Black mothers are often victims of sexist and racist policing practices, facing verbal, sexual, psychological, and economic abuse at the hands of law enforcement. Second, while dealing with their own oppressive relationship with the police, they must simultaneously take action to protect their loved ones from potential violence and harm at the hands of the state. The goal of this research is to examine how community-based politics serve as an opportunity for Black maternal status to be manifested as a form of resistance. I focus on what I refer to as community-based political activity because it is deeply rooted in the fabric of Black women’s political activism and produces more immediate benefits than other forms of political engagement. To examine the effects of direct and indirect police encounters on Black mothers, I pose several questions: How does negative police contact affect Black mothers’ community-based political activity? Does this difference apply to Black women who are not mothers? Using data from the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Elections Survey, my analysis demonstrates that maternal status has a significant impact on Black mothers’ community-oriented political engagement, particularly for those affected by indirect police contact.

Studies investigating motivations for political participation in receiving-state politics among immigrant groups typically follow a traditional approach to understanding the process behind political engagement. In this work, the authors argue that this approach is insufficient if we want to understand the motivations of diasporic groups, notably in cases in which they are geographically close to home and influenced by both origin and receiving-state politics. This study examines the motivations for political party engagement among members of Bosnian diaspora in Austria and elucidates the links between political party membership and receiving-country political opportunity structures which formally result in political detachment from homeland politics. It does so through twenty-five interviews with Bosnian members of Austrian political parties conducted in fourteen cities in Austria. The article focuses on motivations for engagement in political parties which result in detachment from homeland politics and an identification with receiving-state politics. The findings reveal that pre-migratory experiences of war and membership in diasporic associations do not drive the motivations for engagement. Instead, their participation evolves from motives that are embedded in local experiences, while motives related to origin-state opportunity structures are negative or feebly present.

The experiences of Latina women and girls with state surveillance, and their responses to unfair policies and practices, remain underexplored. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Latinas—primarily of Mexican descent—living in San Diego, we examine how encounters with local police and immigration enforcement shape their political practices. Participants described repeated negative encounters with police and immigration enforcement agencies over the life course. These cumulative experiences fostered distrust of police and critical views of surveillance practices designed to restrict the mobility of immigrants and other systematically minoritized groups. In response, many of the women engaged in community organizing and adopted counter-surveillance strategies. Our findings show how patterned experiences with state surveillance generate political critique and action.

This study examines the political participation of undocumented Mexican immigrants residing in the United States in Mexican external voting. As international mobility of people has increased globally, scholarly attention has grown concerning how overseas citizens engage in electoral processes in their countries of origin. However, previous studies based on traditional survey methods may have yielded biased results due to the underrepresentation of undocumented immigrants, who are less likely to enroll in survey company panels due to concerns about the potential compromise of their identities. To include this hard-to-reach population and conduct representative sampling, our research employs a method called respondent-driven sampling (RDS), which permits the surveying of a population devoid of a sampling frame. Our analysis of the Mexican case demonstrates that a lack of electoral information, lower levels of education, and heightened distrust of the Mexican government are associated with diminished electoral participation.

Political participation has long been viewed as a social act. But the influence of social relationships on participation is often impossible to disentangle from the factors that select people into these relationships. To overcome this challenge, we study randomly assigned college roommates, thus reducing these selection biases and other confounds. We examine short-run social influence of roommates on voter participation in 2016 and longer-term effects in the 2018 and 2020 elections. We collected consent from over 2,000 first-year students, allowing us to obtain a matched voter file indicating which students voted and the public voting histories of students’ parents, an indicator of students’ pre-college political environment socialization. Our evidence suggests that roommates’ influence on turnout decisions rivals the association between students’ turnout and that of their parents. Yet this parity masks gender differences. For women, the effect of roommates is larger. For men, the student-parent association exceeds the roommate effect.

This review article points to a number of ways in which the study of political participation has followed separate tracks, hence preventing it from deploying its full potential. We argue that the field stands to benefit much from ‘bridging’ different approaches and insights, combining those from different disciplines or subdisciplines. We review works that try to build such bridges, with the aim of encouraging dialogue across the disciplinary boundaries between political science and political sociology, on the one hand, and sociology and social movement studies, on the other. We advocate that students of political participation take such ‘bridges’ seriously in their work and employ them as the basis for new dynamic theorization. We suggest five possible ways in which the study of political participation may combine different perspectives and research traditions. Three of them are theoretical: bridging rationalist, structuralist and culturalist theoretical approaches; bringing together cognitive (attitudes) and affective (emotions) explanations; and combining macro- and micro-level accounts. The fourth is methodological: bridging qualitative and quantitative methodological approaches. The fifth is substantive: bridging a focus on electoral (institutional) participation with one on non-electoral (non-institutional) participation.

The relative education model holds that educational attainment reflects existing socioeconomic advantages that are associated with participation rather than spurring political participation on its own. Yet, emerging research on compensation effects suggests that greater educational attainment leads to increased political engagement among more marginal populations in which political socialization is less likely to occur outside of schools. We argue that the relative education model will better describe the relationship between education and voting patterns among more advantaged groups. We test our expectations by estimating the relative education model within racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. using data from the Current Population Survey’s (CPS) Voting and Registration Supplement from 1978 to 2020. We find that for relatively highly educated White and Asian American voters, each additional year of education yields diminishing returns to turnout. For Black and Latino voters, additional years of education are positively associated with turnout regardless of relative education. The results suggest that opportunities remain to reduce racial turnout gaps and boost political participation by addressing racial gaps in educational attainment.

Mental health, like physical health, represents an important resource for participating in politics. We bring new insights from six surveys from five different countries (Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United States) that combine diversified questions on mental health problems and political participation. Unlike previous research on depression, we find only limited evidence for the Resource Hypothesis that mental health problems reduce political participation, except in the case of voting and only in some samples. Instead, we find mixed evidence that mental health problems and their comorbidity (experiencing multiple problems) are associated with increased political participation. Our study leads us to more questions than answers: are the measures available in public opinion surveys appropriate for the task? Do general survey samples adequately capture people with mental disorders? And is the assumption that poor mental health reduces political participation wrong?

What shapes the ways in which citizens participate in politics? This article investigates the association between private homeownership and the forms of citizens’ political behaviors using a Chinese nationwide social survey. Exploiting the abolishment of the welfare housing system in the late 1990s as a quasi-natural experiment, I find that owning a home and experiencing home value appreciation increases citizens’ willingness for political engagement as well as participatory behaviors through formal channels, but reduces their confrontational behaviors towards government such as participation in protests. Further evidence on political attitudes suggests that homeowners are more critical of government performance, yet they report higher political trust in the state and a stronger preference for maintaining the status quo. These findings highlight the critical role of asset ownership in preventing conflict and promoting stability by shaping the political behaviors and beliefs of citizens.

This study investigates the effects of media exposure on gender gaps in political participation in post-war Liberia. Five weeks prior to the 2011 general election, women eligible voters in randomly selected villages were provided radio sets and organized to listen to and discuss a series of elections-related programmes from a ’trusted’ United Nations radio in group settings. Results show the programme had positive effects on measures of women’s political participation, but not on men’s political behaviours, suggesting potential narrowing of gender gaps. Results also show the programme improved the quality of women’s political engagement in a way that reflected their own preferences and voting autonomy. Mediation analysis suggests that programme effects likely occurred through enhanced women’s political knowledge and efficacy and by harnessing coordination and mobilization potential of pre-existing civil society groups of a political character.

How does cognitive household labour – the ‘mental load’ involved in anticipating, fulfilling, and monitoring household needs – influence decisions about whether and how to participate in public life? Studies suggest women take on the vast majority of this load, yet the impact of these private sector inequalities on participation in public life is underexplored. To make progress on these questions, we contribute new causal evidence about the effect of prompting respondents to think about their own mental loads in a survey experiment fielded to employed British parents. Our main argument is that priming the mental load will crowd out interest in political and labour market participation. In line with expectations, our survey experiment finds a strong negative effect of mental load priming on intentions to engage in politics and at work. Our results offer new insights about the continuing relevance of household-based inequalities to gender equality in public life.

It is a long-standing view that educational institutions sustain democracy by building an engaged citizenry. However, recent scholarship has seriously questioned whether going to college increases political participation. While these studies have been ingenious in using natural experiments to credibly estimate the causal effect of college, most have produced estimates with high statistical uncertainty. I contend that college matters: I argue that, together, prior effect estimates are just as compatible with a positive effect as a null effect. Furthermore, analyzing two-panel datasets of $n \approx 10,000$ young US voters, using a well-powered difference-in-differences design, I find that attending college leads to a substantive increase in voter turnout. Importantly, these findings are consistent with the statistically uncertain but positive estimates in previous studies. This calls for updating our view of the education-participation relationship, suggesting that statistical uncertainty in prior studies may have concealed that college education has substantive civic returns.

Migrant protest activity has been often analyzed from the perspectives of the protest nature and issues it addressed. A comparison of protest behaviour before and after migration is largely missing. It remains unclear whether people who were actively protesting in their home country continue to be engaged in protests after migration and why. This article addresses this gap in the literature and aims to explain what made the Ukrainian migrants protest before leaving their home country and in Turkey as a host country. The analysis uses individual data from an original survey conducted in May 2023 among 935 Ukrainian migrants living in Turkey. The findings show that there are different migrants who participate in the protests organized in the two countries, and the strongest predictor for political protest is civic engagement. Protest in Ukraine is rooted in the orientation towards domestic politics, while protests abroad are driven by identitarian dimensions.