Institutional Context and Political Participation

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter engages with the notions of institutions and the political context with a view to retracing long-term scholarly developments as well as furthering a new reading of the relationship between institutions and the political context on the one hand and political participation on the other. In particular, the chapter puts a strong emphasis on a research agenda that focusses on fields of politics, embedding institutions and the political context in an analysis that also considers how they can be changed by political participation itself. Drawing on a large volume of empirical research about typically contentious fields such as migration, ethnicity, unemployment, youth, and precarity, the strongest argument is that scholarship is going beyond a conflict-ridden approach that is ubiquitous both within the neo-liberal and the neo-Marxist camp. Many fields of politics may depend upon norms and institutions in the policy sphere intersecting with bottom-up participation in the public sphere.