Political participation: some problems of conceptualization

Abstract

This paper identifies the major problems associated with the process of conceptualizing political participation. Two of them are discussed in detail. The first problem is that researchers ascribe political characteristics to any social behaviour, which is unsupported by proper arguments that would relate the proposed concepts to the subject matter of political science. The second one points to the strong presence of normative and crypto-normative elements, especially in studies of democratic societies.