Digitally Networked Participation and Lifestyle Politics as New Modes of Political Participation

Abstract

Political participation has seen substantial changes in terms of both its structure and its scope. One of the most prominent venues of citizen engagement today is participation that relies on online means. Several approaches to online participation have attempted to understand its nature as a continuation of offline acts into the online realm, or as an independent form. In this article, we determine the place of online participation in the repertoire of political participation with greater precision. We ask whether, in particular, digitally networked participation (DNP) is an expansion of lifestyle politics, or whether there are empirical grounds to classify it as a new, independent mode of participation. We study a large variety of participatory activities using data from an online survey conducted among 2,114 politically active individuals in Belgium in 2017. We use an innovative measurement approach that combines closed- with open-ended questions, which allows us to explore new forms of participation that have previously not been considered or measured. Our results show that DNP is a core part of today's activists' repertoire and a distinct mode of political participation that is clearly attractive to younger, critical citizens.