Political Participation in France and Germany

The main objective of this volume is to answer the question of how France and Germany can be situated in the world of participatory political communities. It sets the historical, theoretical and institutional framework for the comparative empirical analysis of the forms, patterns, trends and determinants of citizen participation in France and Germany. It starts with an outline of the participatory traditions of the two respective countries. Thereafter, it turns to the theoretical foundations of empirical research regarding the role of political participation in modern democracies, and gives an overview as to how the perception of political participation has changed over the years. Furthermore the forms of conventional participation, particularly with regard to electoral participation, and unconventional participation like protest and other new forms of citizen involvement are analysed in detail. Following the new approaches in participation research, social participation is not only supposed to correlate with political participation, but is a specific form of civic engagement for itself. Therefore this aspect is included in the analyses. The volume does not only discuss national trends and patterns but also local ones because elementary differences can be noticed here, depending amongst others on the level of centralisation of the state structure.

Oscar W. Gabriel is a professor of Political Science at the University of Stuttgart, Associate Researcher and former Visiting Professor at the Institute of Political Science Bordeaux. His main research areas are political sociology and political psychology. Silke I. Keil is an assistant professor of Political Science and Political Sociology at the University of Stuttgart. She was general manager of the German Project of the European Social Survey (2006-2010). Her main research areas are political sociology, particularly political attitudes, participation, social capital and electoral behaviour. Eric Kerrouche is a professor at the Institute d'Etudes Politiques de Bordeaux. He is part of the LEA-CODE, a cooperative project between the University of Stuttgart and the IEP to analyse European democratic systems in the context of the enhancement of the European Union. His research interests range from local politics, elected officials and territorial reforms to methods in social science.