Old concept with new power: Why digital and unconventional activities can be political participation

Digitally networked activities and unconventional actions on a community level increase citizens’ repertoire of participation. Political communication research, however, is having a hard time to consistently integrate such activities into the concept of political participation. Our study empirically tests how activities like crowdfunding or urban gardening can be combined with more traditional forms of participation. We use 34 participatory activities from a national survey conducted in Denmark (N=9125) and apply a suggested framework of political participation by van Deth (2014) to this selection. A confirmatory factor analysis demonstrates the existence of four distinct types of political participation. We show that activities formerly described as civic engagement (Zukin et al., 2006; Norris, 2002) can be re-integrated into the concept of political participation and confirm that digitally networked activities rather than being an unidimentional construct are an integral part of most types of political participation. With the suggested measures for these four types of political participation, we give a starting point for future empirical studies to apply this more comprehensive and timely conceptualization of political participation.