Participation and Representation in the Digital Age: Participation Repertoires in an Era of Unequal Representation

Project Information

PRD

Grant agreement ID: 101077659

DOI

10.3030/101077659

EC signature date 16 February 2023

Start date 1 May 2023

End date 30 April 2028

Funded under

• European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 500 000,00

EU contribution

€ 1 500 000,00

Coordinated by

BEN-GURION UNIVERSITY OF THE NEGEV
Israel

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - PRD (Participation and Representation in the Digital Age: Participation Repertoires in an Era of Unequal Representation)

Reporting period: 2023-05-01 to 2025-10-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

How do people incorporate increasingly prevalent nonelectoral political acts into their individual-level repertoires of political participation? And how well are these different types of political participators represented in both objective and subjective measures of representation?

These questions are of utmost importance in an era marked by unequal representation and democratic erosion. Two conflicting global trends over the last several decades highlight the importance of these questions: a clear decline in voter turnout, especially among lower-status groups; and increased nonelectoral participation, especially among higher status groups. To assess how these trends in political participation affect patterns of representation, PRD’s theoretical framework integrates new approaches for investigating the links between individuals’ participation repertoires (i.e. how individuals combine political acts such as voting, protest, and online activism) and representational outcomes of various kinds.

Two distinct yet potentially conflicting democratic ideals lie at the heart of this investigation. The first is responsiveness to the expressed will of the people, meaning that representational outcomes should reflect – at least to some extent – the messages communicated by the public. The second central democratic ideal to be considered is equality of representation, even of those who are not politically active. Given the well-established finding that people who are the most politically active also tend to be advantaged socioeconomically, a strong link between nonelectoral participation and representational outcomes could potentially contribute to unequal representation. These central and potentially contradictory ideals of responsiveness and equality of representation lead to the last question motivating PRD: How can traditionally lower status groups be mobilized and organized to reduce inequalities in contemporary patterns of political participation and representation?

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

This summary of the project’s technical and scientific achievements as of June 2025 (the first two years of the project) follows the order of the project’s work packages, and all publications noted here are available on the project website’s “publications” page: https://www.prd-erc.eu/publications

“Political acts and political participators” (WP1) analyzes separate surveys and a harmonized dataset, and includes methodological innovations using new latent variable techniques for identifying participation repertoires. Main achievements include: completed findings report drafts for the main survey programs; construction of original harmonized dataset repository; and the creation of an open-source software package in R to conduct multilevel latent class analysis (multilevLCA).
Key publications relevant for this work package include:
-Han, Baggetta & Oser (2024) “Organizing and Democracy” in the American Review of Political Science
-Lyrvall, Di Mari, Bakk, Oser & Kuha (2025, in press) “Multilevel Latent Class Analysis: State-of-the-art Methodologies and Their Implementation in the R Package multilevLCA” in Multivariate Behavioral Research
-An accepted journal symposium on data harmonization in PS: Political Science & Politics, coedited by Kołczyńska, Kritzinger & Oser

“Participation-representation connection” (WP2) investigates the connections between political participation analyzed in WP1 and representational outcomes. Even though the majority of the research plan for WP2 was intended to take place in years 3-5, we have already advanced two manuscripts under review (one of which has already received an R&R from a top journal), and three conference papers that are in preparation for journal submission. In addition, we added a new line of research to this work package on literature mapping in the social sciences, which has already produced the following article:
-Shoshan & Oser (2025) “Visualizing Scientific Landscapes”

“Mobilizing and organizing low-status groups” (WP3) analyzes social media data and conducts experimental research to identify interventions with the potential to produce more equal representational outcomes in the future. We have completed the planned observational analysis of the Twitter panel that identifies distinct types of curators of political information for sociodemographic groups. Relevant publication:
-Shamir, Oser & Grinberg (2024), “Who is Curating My Political Feed?”

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

We highlight four results that contribute beyond the state of the art of contemporary scholarship.

#1: The article “Organizing and Democracy” (Han, Baggetta & Oser 2024) in the Annual Review of Political Science. Consistent with the prominence of Annual Review journals in all academic fields, this journal is consistently ranked #1 of the ~300 ranked political science journals. This article provides a new theoretical infrastructure for researchers to advance scholarship on organizing and democracy across three levels; micro (individual), meso (organizational), and macro (public sphere).

#2: The article “Multilevel Latent Class Analysis” (Lyrvall, Di Mari, Bakk, Oser & Kuha 2025) published in Multivariate Behavioral Research, which is currently ranked in JCR in the top 5% of ranked journals in “mathematics, interdisciplinary applications” and in the top 4% in “experimental psychology.” This article documents our creation of a new open-source software package in R called “multilevLCA” which is the first ever open-source software package that allows researchers to identify typological latent classes across multiple levels with complex datasets. This software application is useful across the social sciences and beyond, and the public downloads count on CRAN shows that this R package has already attracted broad use (downloaded 12,000 times since first posted in May, 2023).

#3: The accepted journal symposium on “Data Harmonization in Political Science and Related Fields” co-edited by Kołczyńska, Kritzinger & Oser in a flagship public-facing Q1 journal in political science, PS: Political Science & Politics. This symposium was initiated by the PI’s consultations with leading scholars on survey data harmonization as part of advancing WP1’s objective of creating a harmonized dataset on political participation.

#4: The article “Visualizing Scientific Landscapes” (Shoshan & Oser, 2025) in PS: Political Science & Politics equips researchers to conduct literature mapping analyses similar to the caliber of our Annual Review article in the social sciences and beyond. Our discovery of this approach while preparing the Annual Review article resulted from being inspired by similar research in STEM fields, and our article provides methodological guidelines for implementing this method for political scientists, and social scientists more generally.

Webinar poster

Shoshan_Oser literary mapping

Lyrcall_et al MBR figure

Han_Baggetta_Oser 2024 literary mapping