https://doi.org/10.1177/00027642211021624
American Behavioral Scientist
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DOI: 10.1177/00027642211021624
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Article
Political Action, Protest,
and the Functioning of
Democratic Governance
Russell J. Dalton1
Abstract
The current debate on the vitality of affluent democracies often cites the changing
patterns of citizens’ political participation as signs of this malaise. Fewer citizens
are voting, and more are turning toward contentious and more direct forms of
participation. What are the consequences? I describe the participation patterns in
affluent democracies and then consider whether these changes in citizen participation
are linked to the quality of democratic performance. Some scholars see a more
assertive public as overloading the political system or destroying collective views
of politics. Others see contentious politics as giving citizens an additional and more
effective method of influencing policymakers. The evidence on citizen participation
comes from two waves of the International Social Survey Program. Measures of
the functioning of government come from the Economist Intelligence Unit and the
World Bank. The analyses show that a more active public is correlated with a better
functioning government. Moreover, these relationships are stronger for protest and
other forms of direct action than for voting in national elections. The results suggest
that an assertive and elite-challenging public is more of a boon than a curse for
democratic politics.
Keywords
protest, voting, political participation, quality of governance, democracy
Many political observers see a dark cloud hanging over contemporary democracies.
Political commentators and academic experts opine about the negative effects of the
public’s decreased trust in government. There are even alarmist claims that support for
1
University of California, Irvine, CA, USA
Corresponding Author:
Russell J. Dalton, Center for the Study of Democracy, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697-5100,
USA
Email: rdalton@uci.edu
1021624ABSXXX10.1177/00027642211021624American Behavioral ScientistDalton
research-article2021
2022, Vol. 66(4) 533­–550
534	 American Behavioral Scientist 66(4)2 American Behavioral Scientist 00(0)
democracy itself is waning (Caplan, 2007; Foa & Mounk, 2016; Mounk, 2018;
Przeworski, 2019). In addition, changes in the patterns of citizen participation are
often linked to these trends. Some analysts decry the decline in voting turnout and the
erosion of civil society activity (Patterson, 2003; Putnam, 2000; Wattenberg, 2015). At
the same time, participation in other forms of direct or assertive participation appears
to be increasing (Dalton, 2017; Quaranta, 2016; Vráblíková, 2014).
This essay addresses the question of whether the changing patterns of citizen participation
are a boon or a curse for the function of democratic governance. The first
premise is that the social and political modernization of affluent democracies over the
past several decades has systematically altered the distribution of citizen skills and
political norms, which has produced a shift in the patterns of political participation.
Traditional electoral politics now competes with an expanding menu of possible political
activities. Protest and other forms of contentious action have increased, becoming
an extension of conventional politics by other means (Quaranta, 2016). Other types of
direct action and online activism have also increased. The result is an expansion of
political participation along with a diffusion in the forms of participation (Dalton,
2017; Vráblíková, 2014). In theoretical terms, a more involved public should be beneficial
to good governance.
However, the increasing levels of protest—as documented by other articles in this
issue—are sometimes cited as a sign of the erosion of the democratic process. Several
critics build on the Burkean concept that assertive citizens make excessive and disruptive
demands on government, which can overload the democratic system’s ability to
perform (Crozier et al., 1975; Putnam, 2000; Rucht, 2007; Wolfe, 2006; Zakaria,
2007). Discussions on the current divisions between populist movements, far-right
groups, progressives, and centrist establishment groups highlight these concerns. At
times, this argument borders on describing protestors as barbarians at the gates of politics,
fueled by ideology and political discontent. The end result is to question whether
the active, assertive citizens described in the other essays in this collection impede or
benefit good democratic governance.
The accuracy of the negative claims about a participatory public—especially in the
case of protest activity—lies at the heart of our study. While prior research has described
the changing patterns of citizen participation across affluent democracies, the effects of
these changes on governance are still under debate. Our goal is to go beyond the discursive
approach to consider a central principle of political culture theory: congruence. Is
there a systematic link between citizen participation patterns and the quality of governance
across democracies? The style of participation is an important mechanism for the
expression of citizens’ voices. Do democratic governments function better if this voice
is expressed through voting and other forms of institutionalized political participation or
through more assertive and elite-challenging forms of action? Instead of disrupting
effective governance, protest might—in the long term—encourage democratic governments
to be more effective and representative. This is an important question in a volume
focusing on the rise of protest and methods of studying protest.
The evidence on citizen participation primarily comes from two waves of the
International Social Survey Program (ISSP). Measures of the functioning of
Dalton	 535Dalton 3
government come from the World Bank (WB) and the Economist Intelligence Unit
(EIU). The analyses show that a more active public is correlated with a better-functioning
government across affluent democracies. Moreover, these relationships are
stronger for protest and other forms of direct action than for voting in national elections.
The results suggest that well-functioning democracies enable citizens to participate,
even in ways that challenge political authorities. The rule of law, press freedom,
and freedom of association expand with democratization, and thus, an assertive public
may be another indicator of democratic development.
Changing Patterns of Political Participation
There is a long theoretical literature and more recent empirical literature on the link
between citizen participation and aggregate measures of government performance.
The connection between a participatory culture and government performance was central
in Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba’s (1963) description of the civic culture and
its consequences for effective democracy in Britain and the United States. Robert
Putnam’s (1993) landmark study of democratic governance across Italian regions provided
strong empirical evidence that the level of citizen participation was related to
good governance. More recently, Putnam (2000) and Stephen Knack (2002) found that
a “social capital” index including political activity was correlated with better governance
across the U.S. states as well.
Explicit in this research is the assumption that networks of civic engagement are
“an essential component of social capital” that benefits the functioning of democratic
governments (Putnam, 1993, p. 173). This builds on Alexis de Tocqueville’s (1966)
classic observation on the value of civil society in developing strong democratic governance.
Citizen participation was seen as essential for a democratic system, although
this was often equated with participation in institutionalized forms of action, such as
voting and campaign activity.
Missing from much of this literature, however, is an examination of how participation
in various modes of action might affect the governing process. Putnam and others
place a premium on conventional methods of participation, such as voting, contacting
a public official, or participating in voluntary groups. Participation in a protests, boycotts,
or other forms of contentious action seems to run counter to the social capital
logic. For example, Carles Boix and Daniel Posner (1998) discussed the potential
causal mechanisms for social capital to increase good governance, and contentious
participation seems at odds with all five of their potential explanations. Putnam (2000)
was somewhat skeptical of protest and contentious politics; he claimed that these
activities were decreasing and had limited social capital benefits.
Protest activities are also different from conventional methods by their form and
their relationship to government. Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow (2006) described
such actions as “contentious” because they challenged governments in their methods
and often their goals. Inglehart (1990) highlighted the “elite-challenging” nature of
protest activities. These contentious elements are what generate questions about the
impact of protest on the good functioning of democracies. We use the term
536	 American Behavioral Scientist 66(4)4 American Behavioral Scientist 00(0)
“contentious” or simply “protest” to identify these actions that present specific claims,
often reject existing social and political arrangements, and use direct-action methods
(Van Deth, 2016).
Consequently, a consistent strand in the literature viewed noninstitutional, elitechallenging,
and contentious forms of action as a detriment to good governance
(Crozier et al., 1975). Protest activity might not develop the broader feelings of societal
trust and reciprocity that are central to the social capital concept. In addition,
protest typically intends to challenge the current status quo and circumvent the institutionalized
methods of political participation and deliberations, which can further disrupt
the governing process. The potential violence of some protests is another
antisystem challenge. Thus, some scholars have reservations about interpreting citizen
protest in the same positive way as the civic benefits of activity in voluntary associations
or conventional political activity (Deutsch et al., 2005; Rucht, 2007).
In contrast, the social movements literature stresses the potential positive consequences
of protest activity (Della Porta & Diani, 2006; Meyer & Tarrow, 1998).
Political protest can be an effective vehicle to hold elected officials accountable, and
not just at the time of elections. Protest can directly advocate specific issue positions
without the intermediation of other actors. This is especially relevant for interests that
are not institutionalized. And by the nature of its methods, protest can be a high-pressure
activity in prompting government action. Thus, several scholars argue that an
assertive public and protest make a democratic system more accountable and representative
of the citizenry (Meyer & Tarrow, 1998; Morales, 2009; Welzel & Dalton, 2014).
A strength of democracies is the accountability mechanism by which citizen inputs
can affect government actions. Otherwise, the problems of principal–agent failures,
rent seeking, outright corruption, and so on, doom effective governance in addressing
the needs of all. Thus, citizens cannot be passive in such circumstances, and an
increased level of citizen participation in elite-challenging activities may improve the
functioning of government. More voters is a good thing. More letter writers, petition
signers, political contributors, and even contentious protestors may be a good thing for
contemporary democracies.
Is Contentious Activity Increasing?
One preliminary question is whether contentious activity is increasing in affluent
democracies. The best cross-national evidence on the public’s increasing use of contentious
politics comes from a time series begun in 1974 (Barnes & Kaase, 1979).
Survey respondents were asked about participation in several forms of contentious
action; the World Values Survey (WVS) repeated these questions across multiple
waves.1
These surveys allow us to track the growth in contentious action across eight
affluent democracies from 1974-1975 to approximately 2015.2
Figure 1 shows a significant increase in boycotts, lawful demonstrations, and petition
signing over this time span averaged across the eight nations combined. In each
trend, activity levels roughly double overtime. For example, the share of the public
who say they participated in a lawful demonstration rose from 9% in the 1970s to 22%
Dalton	 537Dalton 5
in the most recent WVS. The percentage signing a petition rose from 32% to 58%. In
each nation, all three examples of contentious participation are higher at the end of the
series than at the start (also see Quaranta, 2016). We presume that protest levels would
have been even lower if data were available for the 1950s and 1960s, and thus, the
increase over time would be greater.3
Given this special issue’s focus on the measurement and correlates of contentious
politics, examining the link between protest (and other forms of participation) and the
quality of democratic governance highlights a potentially major implication of rising
contentious participation. I examine this link only in established democracies where
the foundations for democratic discourse are more solid. Contentious politics in these
nations aims at reforming the system or shifting policy priorities, rather than regime
change. By assembling cross-national data linking citizen participation and governance,
we can marshal new evidence on this topic.
The Empirical Resources
Studying the link between citizen participation and good governance requires data at
two levels. Microlevel data document the individual-level participation patterns across
Figure 1. The growth of contentious political action over time.
Note. Entries are the average percentages for the eight nations in the Political Action Survey: Austria,
Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Great Britain, and the United States.
Source. Data sources are the 1974-1975 Political Action Survey; 1981-1983, 1990-1993, 1999-2002
World Values Surveys; 1999-2002 European Values Survey; 2006-2008 World Values Survey for the
United States and 2008 European Values Survey for other nations; and 2017-2020 World Values Survey
for the United States and European Values Survey for Germany.
538	 American Behavioral Scientist 66(4)6 American Behavioral Scientist 00(0)
nations. Then macrolevel data allow us to connect the participation patterns with the
performance of government. This section describes these two resources separately.
Microlevel Data
The first step is to measure the patterns of citizen participation cross-nationally. The ISSP
is a cooperative project between independent academic survey projects around the globe.
The nations participating in each thematic module are asked a set of questions, which are
then compiled into a common data set.4
The 2004 and 2014 modules included a battery of
political participation questions (see the appendix in the online version of this journal).
Besides inquiring about voting in the previous election, the survey was short on campaign
activity questions; the closest item is probably formal party membership. Another question
asks about contributing to a social or political group, and many contributions may
involve parties and elections. There are several questions on contentious action, as well as
two questions on contacting a politician or public official. One item asked about joining
an internet political forum. The mix of items is not ideal—researchers always like to have
more questions—but these items represent all except communal activity (i.e., group activities)
from the standard list of participation modes (Verba et al., 1995).
I used principal components analysis with varimax rotation to determine the clustering
of items into general modes of participation. After some exploratory analyses, a
robust three-dimensional framework emerged in both years (Table 1).5
The first
dimension taps examples of protest politics—petition signing, boycotting, and demonstrating—as
well as the item on donating money for a social or political cause.
The second dimension includes the two examples of contacting a politician/civil servant
or the media. In addition, attending a political meeting or rally—distinct from a
protest demonstration—is related to this dimension. It is informative that political party
membership is the highest loading item on this dimension. Contacting a politician normally
involves contacting a partisan figure, and political meetings or rallies are often part
of partisan politics. So there is a significant partisan component to contacting.
The third dimension juxtaposes two forms of political action. This dimension is
primarily defined by the very high coefficient for voting in the last national election
(.90 in 2014 and .82 in 2004). Voting also contrasts with joining an internet political
forum, which has a negative coefficient on the same dimension.
These results led to the construction of six indices of political participation:
1. Voting is the report of voting in the last national election.
2. Contributing money can overlap with campaign activity and is especially relevant
to class differences in participation.
3. Contacting combines contacts with either politicians or the media.
4. Protest includes the contentious actions of petition signing, boycotting, and
demonstrating.
5. Online activity is participating in an online forum.
6. The overall participation index adds all five modes of action into a single
measure.
Dalton	 539Dalton 7
I constructed six 0.0-1.0 participation indices for the 2004 ISSP established democracies
(N = 18) and the 2014 ISSP nations (N = 14).6
These indices provide the participation
measures for the first part of the participation–governance linkage.
Table 2 presents the patterns of participation across the affluent democracies surveyed
in the 2014 ISSP. In broad terms, these results are consistent with other recent
studies of cross-national participation levels.7
For example, voting in the last election
is the most common form of political action. Self-reports of voting range from 96% in
Australia and Belgium, with their compulsory voting laws, to only 69% in the United
States and 76% in Switzerland.
Contributing to a social or political cause is also quite common across democratic
publics (an average of .46). The level of protest activity is also relatively high across
nations, with the French and several Scandinavian nations being the most active; and the
Japanese are the least likely to use contentious forms of action (Quaranta, 2016). The
Table 1. Dimensions of Political Activity.
Activity
2004 2014
Protest
Contacted
politicians
Voting vs.
internet forum Protest
Contact
politicians
Voting vs.
internet forum
Signed a petition .72 .07 .19 .74 .08 .13
Boycotted
products
.77 .07 .01 .77 .09 .04
Participated in a
demonstration
.59 .26 −.12 .63 .30 −.04
Donated/raised
money
.52 .28 .01 .56 .30 .08
Attended
a political
meeting
.37 .66 .04 .40 .66 .05
Member of a
political party
−.15 .77 .23 −.18 .76 .23
Contacted
politicians
.38 .63 .02 .35 .66 .05
Contacted media .42 .54 −.24 .38 .61 −.18
Voted in election .17 .16 .82 .17 .10 .90
Joined internet
forum
.34 .47 −.43 .40 .50 −.28
Eigenvalue
Variance
explained (%)
2.39
23.9
2.25
21.5
1.04
10.4
2.50
25.0
2.28
22.8
1.01
10.1
Note. Entries are coefficients from principal components analysis with varimax rotation. Pairwise
exclusion of missing data. Shaded cells are highest loading items.
Source. Data are from the 2004 and 2014 International Social Survey Program surveys for established
democracies.
540	 American Behavioral Scientist 66(4)8 American Behavioral Scientist 00(0)
level of political contacting is more modest, with a substantial cross-national range in this
activity. Participating in an online political forum had the lowest level of activity, but this
has been rising since the 2004 survey and likely has continued to increase (Dalton, 2017).8
There is significant cross-national variation in each of these political activities,
which provides the variance for our study of participation effects. The small number
of cases limits the statistical analysis options, but this set of nations covers a large
share of the established, affluent democracies of Europe, North America, and the Asia/
Pacific region.9
Macrolevel Data
Several researchers have linked overall participation or social capital measures to the
performance of regional governments within a nation, and this research extends this
approach to cross-national comparisons using multiple modes of political action. We
focus on established democracies so that the basic principles of governance are the
same and the potential for citizens to participate is relatively comparable. In contrast,
protest activity in less democratic systems may be actively discouraged by the state,
Table 2. Cross-National Participation Patterns, 2014.
Voting
Contributing
money
Contact with
politicians Protest
Internet
forum All five
Australia .96 .39 .30 .53 .27 .50
Austria .85 .57 .27 .45 .21 .48
Belgium .96 .44 .27 .50 .19 .48
Denmark .95 .56 .29 .53 .26 .52
Finland .84 .38 .32 .45 .23 .45
France .90 .43 .20 .55 .16 .45
Germany .85 .63 .31 .50 .19 .51
Iceland .92 .45 .29 .57 .29 .51
Japan .73 .27 .09 .25 .06 .29
Netherlands .83 .41 .28 .43 .19 .44
Norway .92 .53 .29 .49 .25 .51
Spain .85 .39 .24 .47 .20 .43
Sweden .95 .53 .30 .57 .23 .52
Switzerland .73 .58 .25 .45 .14 .44
United Kingdom — .37 .30 .47 .22 —
United States .69 .46 .31 .45 .27 .45
All established democracies .86 .46 .27 .47 .21 .46
ISSP developing democracies .76 .24 .17 .25 .16 .32
Note. Entries are the mean scores on participation in each area: from “0,” lowest score on activity to
“1,” highest score on activity. ISSP = International Social Survey Program.
Source. Data are from the 2014 ISSP for established democracies. The averages at the bottom compare
the established democracies listed in the table with the other, developing democracies in the survey.
Dalton	 541Dalton 9
and the protests may often challenge regime values—so we do not imply that our
results extend beyond established democracies.10
The theoretical and empirical measurement of good governance is complex. There
is a very large theoretical literature on the possible elements of democracy (Held,
2006). Another large and still growing literature focuses on public satisfaction with the
working of the democratic process as a consequence or measure of the function of
government (Ferrín & Kriesi, 2016; Norris, 1999, 2011; van Ham et al., 2017). Citizens
also can differ in their definition of democracy, and implicitly in how democracies
should function (Teorell et al., 2007). These subjective measures are important to
track, but they are different from our interest in the formal processes of governance.
Our interest in the functioning of government relies on cross-national studies that
empirically assess broad governing traits such as democratic accountability, representation,
and administration. There is no ideal definition and measure on which researchers
agree. We utilize two of the most widely cited and used cross-national measures of
government performance: the EIU and WB measures of democratic governance. These
measures are used extensively in the planning of the WB and other international institutions,
as well as by social science researchers.
The EIU (2014) calculates an index of the positive functioning of government.11
The EIU index assesses whether democratically based decisions cannot or are not
implemented by the government. The index is based on 14 items that include traits
such as legislative rights, checks and balances, freedom from the military or any
other entity separate from the democratic government, corruption, public confidence
in government institutions, the quality of administration, and the rule of law. Elff
and Ziaja (2018) describe this as the horizontal accountability of government.
Citizen participation is part of a separate EIU index so that it is differentiated from
the functioning of government measure. Our theoretical hypothesis is that if citizen
participation does overload democratic governments in a dysfunctional way, then it
would have a negative effect on the EIU governance index. The highest scores on the
EIU index are for Finland and Sweden; the lowest are for Spain and the United
Kingdom.
Because government performance has potentially varied meanings across nations,
I cross-validated the EIU measure by comparing it with the WB index of government
effectiveness.12
The WB says that its government effectiveness index captures perceptions
of the quality of public services, the quality of the civil service and the degree of
its independence from political pressures, the quality of policy formulation and implementation,
and the credibility of the government’s commitment to such policies. The
index combines several dozen variables (ranging from the quality of the bureaucracy
to the distribution infrastructure of goods and services) from diverse international
sources (Guisan, 2009; Kaufmann et al., 2008). We selected the government effectiveness
index because it taps whether government “works,” which is the concern of those
who argue that contentious participation overloads the administration of government.
As one example of its application, Magalhães (2014) used this measure as a predictor
of satisfaction with democracy. The highest effectiveness scores are for Denmark,
Finland, and Switzerland; the lowest scores are for Portugal and Spain.
542	 American Behavioral Scientist 66(4)10 American Behavioral Scientist 00(0)
There is a very strong correlation between the two government performance indices
(r = .77). To address causality questions, both performance measures were lagged by
1 or 2 years after the ISSP surveys.
Do Active Citizens Equal Good Government?
Are the levels and forms of citizens’ participation related to the performance of their
government? Government institutions only exist at the aggregate level, and therefore
individual orientations primarily affect institutions by their aggregate configuration.
Likewise, “culture” is not an individual attribute but a collective property that represents
the aggregate of all individuals in a nation. Thus, I calculated each nation’s average
level of political activity for each of the five modes in Table 2. The key question
is whether the aggregate patterns of political activity in a nation are related to governance
performance. Prior research suggests a positive relationship for conventional
forms of political action (Knack, 2002; Putnam, 1993, 2000), while the impact of
contentious action was debated.
Table 3 shows the relationship between each of the participation modes and the two
indices of government performance. Each form of political action is positively related
to both government performance indices—all participation positively covaries with
good governance. For example, nations that score near the top of the EIU index—such
as Norway, New Zealand, Canada, and Denmark—also have fairly high levels of overall
citizen participation (all five modes combined). Conversely, the four lowest levels
of participation occur in nations that are below average in the functioning of government.
With weaker relationships, the WB index of government effectiveness follows
the same pattern.
The strength of these relationships varies across modes, however. Voting turnout
displays one of the weakest correlations. This is presumably because elections are
infrequent, the range in turnout is limited, and cross-national variations in turnout are
Table 3. Participation Modes and Government Performance.
Political participation
Economist Intelligence Unit
Functioning of government
World Bank government
effectiveness
Voting .19 .16
Contributing .30*
.16
Contacting politician/public servant .33*
.28
Protest .24 .25
Internet forum .09 .03
Four nonvoting modes .35*
.26
All five modes .36*
.27
Note. Entries are Pearson’s r correlations (N = 34).
Source. Data source is the aggregate file from the 2004 and 2014 International Social Survey Program;
government performance indicators are from the European Intelligence Unit and World Bank.
*p < .10.
Dalton	 543Dalton 11
generated by the electoral system and other contextual factors. Central to our interest,
the strongest correlations are for citizen-initiative activities that are more policy
focused and occur when and how citizens choose. Contacting politicians or public
officials and contributing money fit the Tocqueville-Putnam model of direct citizen
action through conventional channels. Also, protest activity—signing petitions, taking
part in demonstrations, and boycotting—displays almost the same positive relationship.
An assertive public—in both conventional and contentious politics—is a part of
making democracy work.13
Figure 2 illustrates these patterns. The top panel displays the relationship between
voting turnout and the EIU governance index across all data points. There is a modest
positive, albeit insignificant, correlation between voting turnout rates and the good
governance index. The slope shows that each .10 increase in voting turnout increases
the governance score by .15 (b = 1.53). By comparison, the relationship for the protest
index in the second panel is considerably stronger, nearly double the slope for turnout
(b = 2.71).
Even more striking are the results if we combine all four nonvoting modes of political
participation. The third panel of the table shows that overall levels of citizens’
nonelectoral participation are a markedly stronger correlate of good governance (b =
5.27). It is not just contacting politicians or civil servants, or being active online, or
protesting that makes for good governance. The highest levels of good governance are
in nations where citizens are active in all of these ways.
Because voting turnout statistics are so accessible for analysis and commentary,
and voting is the central participatory act in a democracy, political observers often
focus on turnout as a measure of the vibrancy of a democracy (Diamond, 2019;
Franklin, 2004). The results of this study suggest that this focus is misplaced. I used a
simple, three-variable multivariate model—voting turnout, an index of all four nonvoting
items, and the year of the ISSP survey—to predict the EIU governance index.14
This analysis shows a drop in government performance between 2004 and 2014, probably
because of the negative economic and political effects of the Great Recession
(β = −.20). The strongest correlate of government performance is nonelectoral participation
(β = .31), while voting turnout trails far behind (β = .13).
This is painting on a large canvas with broad, brush strokes. And any empirical
measure is imprecise. Measuring general participation patterns from an opinion survey
is problematic since a specific event during fieldwork may affect the survey results.
The measurement of turnout from opinion surveys also is imprecise because people
tend to overestimate their own voting levels. The multi-indicator measure of the functioning
of government is also imperfect, which is why I used two alternative measures
for comparison. Still the evidence across these two time points and different measures
of government performance is consistent.
It would be ideal to extend the research to multiyear, cross-national measures of
participation. For example, events-based measures of protest might expand the analy-
ses.15
A promising approach is the compilation and standardization of participation
measures across different survey projects (Jenkins & Kwak, this issue; Slomczynski
et al., 2016). Combining separate surveys measuring protest activity may develop a
544	 American Behavioral Scientist 66(4)12 American Behavioral Scientist 00(0)
Voting
Protest
7
7.5
8
8.5
9
9.5
10
0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1
EIUGovernmentFuncƟoningScore
Vote Turnout
7
7.5
8
8.5
9
9.5
10
0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5
EIUGovernmentFuncƟoningScore
Non-Electoral ParƟcipaƟon Total Score
7
7.5
8
8.5
9
9.5
10
0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6
EIUGovernmentFuncƟoningScore
Average Protest Score
Total Non-Electoral
Figure 2. Citizen participation levels and the functioning of government.
Dalton	 545Dalton 13
time series that could more directly test the causal relationship between contentious
politics and the functioning of democratic governments.
In addition, more sophisticated modeling is needed to assert causality. Do good citizens
make good governments, or does good government make good citizens? To some
extent, it is likely that both are true. One presumes that a well-functioning democracy
enables a more active public and provides additional opportunities for citizen involvement.
This is especially true for contentious actions such as demonstrations. Long,
regular time series are needed to address this topic. The data used here are not sufficient
to explore this topic, even though the analyses used time-lagged governance
measures to lessen the simultaneity problem. So we should treat these results as suggestive,
meriting further research.
Still, these analyses reaffirm the argument from Jefferson to Tocqueville to Verba,
Scholzman, and Brady. Expanding the public’s voice beyond voting is essential to
have a fully democratic polity and broadly improves the quality of governance. And
despite the repeated concerns about the potentially disruptive and contentious nature
of protest activity, high levels of protest in established democracies are a strong correlate
of the quality of democratic governance. Far from creating a crisis of democracy,
public participation in a wide range of political activities seems to contribute to
an effective, functioning democracy.
Good Citizens and Good Government
A long-standing view in political science held that the good democratic citizen was an
allegiant supporter of the political system, with only limited involvement in politics,
primarily through voting and other conventional activities (Almond & Verba, 1963).
As social conditions began to change in the latter 20th century, citizen values followed
(Inglehart, 1990, 2018; Welzel, 2015). Public attention to new cultural issues strained
existing political alliances, deference to authority decreased, and people sought more
control over the decisions affecting their lives (Welzel & Dalton, 2014). The result has
been an expansion of political engagement in most established democracies and
greater use of direct and contentious forms of action.
Our question was whether these more assertive forms of action weaken democratic
governance because of system overload or simply the disruption caused by contentious
action. There is no shortage of skeptics who warn against the perils produced by
a more active public or even agonize over the limits of the public when it comes to
voting (Achen & Bartels, 2016; Brennan, 2016).
This study examined the relationship between the patterns of citizen participation
and the functioning of government. An effective and responsive government should be
a foundation of the democratic process. The empirical evidence suggests that nations
with higher levels of voting turnout have better-functioning governments. However,
political activities beyond voting are even more strongly related to better governance.
Democracy does not stop on Election Day, and neither should a democratic public.
Thus, a citizenry that is more active in politics is a boon for democratic performance—
and contentious political activities follow the same pattern.
546	 American Behavioral Scientist 66(4)14 American Behavioral Scientist 00(0)
Consequently, the Burkean premise of “undisturbed leadership” as a model of representative
democracy overlooks the basic challenge of the principal–agent relationship
in political representation. To a degree, governance is a customer service function: If
the customers (citizens) do not raise their voices to make their demands heard, the service
providers will not hear them and thus are not doing their best for the public interest
even if well-intentioned. A passive electorate leaves interests unexpressed and unrepresented,
and political agents possess too much discretion in their actions. Thus, the
empirical evidence suggests that democracies do better when the clientele is assertive.
While this research focused on good governance, we should also recognize that a
prime goal of contentious participation is to expand the boundaries of political debate,
bringing new issues into public discourse that might not arise in elite-dominated conventional
political activity. This is a potential benefit of a contentious public that challenges
the status quo and might be considered the raison d’être for contentious political
action. The goal of an assertive public is not to influence the functioning of government
but the content of governance.
One caveat is that this study restricted the analyses to established democracies where
strong institutions, an active civil society, and embedded democratic norms are in place.
Indeed, these are the very contexts where protests can easily expand as a tool of citizen
influence (which again raises the question of the causal direction of the observed relationships).
Thus, there is an ironic pattern that citizen participation in protest activities is
more common in affluent democracies than in developing democracies. Protests in affluent
democracies also seek to advance policy goals and represent an extension of conventional
forms of participation with new tools. In developing democracies, authorities may
seek to repress protests as a threat to the new regime, or representatives of the predemocratic
regime may use protest activities to attack the new political order (Sadovskava
et al., 2019; Shigetomi & Makino, 2009). Thus, some protests may have an antisystem
objective. The existence of such regime differences deserves further attention.
In summary, rising assertive cultures present new challenges for established and
developing democracies. A more assertive and contentious public places new political
demands on the political process. A more assertive public also generates political tensions
and conflict. And citizens may question existing democratic institutions and
require reforms to update them to meet contemporary needs.16
This is often how
democracies have expanded the rights of citizens in the past. Eventually, however, a
participatory citizenry can move societies closer to realizing democracy’s key inspirational
promise: empowering people to make their own decisions and to make their
preferences heard and counted in politics.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
Dalton	 547Dalton 15
Supplemental Material
Supplemental material for this article is available online.
Notes
1. More information on the WVS project and access to these surveys can be found on the
project website: http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org.
2. The eight nations are Austria, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Great
Britain, and the United States. Figure 1 averages the percentage of those who have ever
done each activity across the eight nations. Among the 144 data points, in 9 instances, a
nation was missing from a WVS survey. In these cases, I interpolated the average between
the adjacent time points.
3. One complication of the participation measures is the different wording of possible activity
levels. The WVS asked whether the respondent had done the activity in the past, without
a time limit. Other surveys ask about participation during 1-, 2-, or 5-year time spans.
This might affect the baseline survey, but the common wording probably has only modest
effects on the time trend because of counterbalancing effects.
4. More information on the ISSP can be found on its website: www.issp.org. The GESIS
archive in Germany provided the survey data (www.gesis.org). I want to thank the participants
in the ISSP for collecting these data and sharing them with the international research
community.
5. In 2014, the third dimension had an eigenvalue of .998, so I constrained the analysis to
extract a third dimension.
6. Each item was coded so that the full variance of the responses was used. The responses
ranged from .0 = Have not done and would never do, to .33 = Have not done but might do,
to .66 = Have done in the distant past, to 1.0 = Have done in the past year. When the items
were combined in an additive index, the total was divided by the number of questions, so
all the indices also range from 0 to 1. (See the online appendix for the question wordings.)
7. Kateřina Vráblíková (2014) studied nonelectoral participation cross-nationally and the factors
that affect national participation levels; Mario Quaranta (2016) and Dalton (2017) used
the WVS to describe and predict cross-national levels of protest activity.
8. This essay focuses on the set of affluent, established democracies in the 2004 and 2014
ISSP surveys. It is worth noting that the overall levels of political activity in the developing
democracies in the ISSP are substantially lower. The last rows of the table show that aside
from voting turnout, most other forms of political activity are about twice as common in
the established democracies as in the developing democracies.
9. The 2004 ISSP included data from Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France,
Germany, Ireland, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden,
Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
10. Prior research does suggest that broad indicators of democratization are positively related
to protest activity levels (Quaranta, 2016; Dalton et al. 2010).
11. EIU (www.eiu.com). The index theoretically ranges from 0.0 to 10.0.
12. WB, world governance indicators (http://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi). The index
theoretically ranges from 0 to 100. Compared with the EIU index, the WB index shows less
variation across the established democracies.
13. I attempted to replicate these analyses using the events data from the World Handbook IV
project, with annual average and total protest activity figures between 2000 and 2004 (the
Protest summary). There is essentially no relationship between the protest estimates from
548	 American Behavioral Scientist 66(4)16 American Behavioral Scientist 00(0)
the ISSP and the World Handbook (r = .003) for the 18 nations in the 2004 ISSP. I think
this is because a simple counting of events is an imperfect indicator of the participation
levels of the general public when the results are constrained to established democracies.
(Also see Kriesi et al., this issue.).
14. The results are as follows:
b β
Voting turnout 1.06 .13
Nonelectoral participation 4.65 .31
2004-2014 −.33 −.20
Constant 6.32
Multiple R = .40
15. However, there are questions of the breadth of participation versus repeated activity by
small intense minorities. My exploratory analyses found that national-level survey-based
and events-based protest measures are not strongly correlated, so I did not explore the
events-based measures (Also, see Kriesi et al., this issue).
16. See the discussion of institutional changes that have already occurred in Smith (2009).
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Author Biography
Russell J. Dalton is a research professor at the University of California, Irvine. His research
focuses on the role of citizens in the democratic process, such as Political realignment (2018)
and The participation gap (2017).