How subjective representations of citizenship affect political behavior: new forms of political participation in South America

Abstract

How do citizens perceive political legitimacy and how does it affect the political behaviors of citizens in a less institutional way? On the one hand, political science has developed several theories about electoral behavior within the framework of institutional participation. However, the new forms of participation have not been studied in the same way, even if research has been done increasingly on the topic over the last years. An agreement is that the patterns of citizenship have been changing and a new citizenship’s conceptions have emerged. On the other hand, social psychology has been particularly interested to understand the perceived legitimacy in relation to authority and law at the individual level, which is closely related to new forms of participation. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to measure the relationship between subjective representations of citizenship (or group belonging) and the new forms of political participation. This paper is at the crossroad of social psychology and political science theory. A comparative analysis has been carried out focused on four South American countries that have been characterized by an increase in new forms of political participation since the recovered democracy to date. Data has been obtained from World Values Survey. Univariate and multivariate analysis has been applied. Results show that subjective representations of critical citizenship to the perception of an authoritarian context explain an increase of new forms of participation. This paper argues that subjective representations of citizenship have an effect in the new forms of political participation