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Dr Eline de Rooij awarded ESRC Post Doctoral Fellowship

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Congratulations to Eline de Rooij, who has been awarded an ESRC Post Doctoral Fellowship from 1 March 2009 for twelve months. Her project title is `Specialisation in Types of Political Participation in Europe`.


Eline`s research project aims to answer the question how and why individuals specialise in different types of political participation. Using the first round of the European Social Survey (ESS), a high quality survey conducted in 21 European countries, and applying a range of different statistical methods, she distinguishes four types of political participation: voting, conventional and unconventional political participation, and consumer politics. She shows that in countries with higher levels of socio-economic development and more democratic experience, the degree to which individuals concentrate their political activities within one type of political participation is higher, regardless of the accessibility and responsiveness of their political institutions. This is partly due to the fact that these countries have a higher educated population and that higher educated individuals specialise more. Specialisation also varies along the lines of other socio-demographic divisions (e.g. gender), but these individual differences do not account for country differences in specialisation. Moreover, Eline shows that in contexts in which political issues are salient, such as during an election year, individuals are more likely to engage in non-electoral types of political participation if they also vote. This implies that specialisation is reduced during times of country-wide political mobilisation.

Eline argues that these country differences are due to the different ways in which individuals become engaged. She theorises that in long established democracies distinct social groups are mobilised mostly by highly professional action groups into distinct types of political participation. In less established democracies mobilisation occurs in less set ways. This idea is strengthened by the finding that immigrants tend to concentrate their political activities less within one type of political participation than the majority population. She argues that this again indicates that specialisation increases with (democratic) experience.

With these findings Eline`s research makes the following important contributions: (1) it broadens the narrow focus of current research on levels of political participation by showing the importance of differences in the degree to which individuals specialise in distinct types of political participation; (2) it adapts and extends existing theories of political participation to

explain differences in the degree of specialisation between different groups in society and between countries; (3) it incorporates a far larger number of countries than previous studies, thus allowing an exploration of the impact of the national political context on specialisation in political participation and its interaction with individual characteristics. Moreover, as part of the project she proposes to extend this research to include all three rounds of the ESS, covering the period from 2002 to 2006, allowing for an initial exploration of possible changes in specialisation over time.

As well as providing an important contribution to the study of political participation, this project is relevant to questions regarding the representation of individuals belonging to different social groups and to discussions on decreasing and/or changing citizen engagement.