A final question from the CSES project asked about participation in a protest or demonstration over the previous five years. Figure 3 indicates relatively low levels of protest activity among the U.S. public. Protest is part of the repertoire of action for contemporary publics, especially in many European nations where other surveys indicate that such activity has grown over the past three decades.

Even in this case, however, American participation has increased when compared with levels reported by comparably worded questions asked in the late 1960s and again in the late 1980s. Americans today are as likely to say they have attended a protest or demonstration as they were in 1967, when the Vietnam War was raging, the civil rights movement was in full swing, and U.S. politics was in tumult. Rather than disengagement, Americans are still engaged, according to this measure.

Why have past analyses—excluding Tocqueville’s—missed the continuing participatory nature of Americans? We suspect that part of the reason is the changing nature of participation in the United States. Those factors that are easiest to count—turnout in national elections and formal membership in large national associations—are showing decreased activity levels.

Instead, involvement is shifting toward areas where activity is citizen-initiated, directly linked to government, and more policy-oriented—such as direct contacting of political leaders or working with citizen groups. Better-educated and more sophisticated citizens want to be more politically engaged, but not in traditional forms of partisan and electoral activity, where elites structure the choices and the opportunities for action. The self-mobilized individual favors referendums over elections, and group activity over campaign work. Similarly, participation in citizen lobbies, single-issue groups, and citizen-action movements is increasing in nearly all advanced industrial democracies, and the American public is leading in these patterns.

In short, the contemporary patterns in political activity represent changes in the style of political action, not just changes in the level of participation. In the new style of citizen politics, people try to take more control over political activity into their own hands. These changes in participation make greater demands on the participants, and, at the same time, increase public pressure on political elites. Citizen participation is becoming more closely linked to citizen influence.

De Tocqueville would be pleased.    

Russell J. Dalton is professor of political science at the University of California, Irvine.       

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