UNCONVENTIONAL PARTICIPATION IN TIME OF CRISIS: How Ideology Shapes Citizens’ Political Actions

Since democracy requires the involvement of citizens, the topic of political participation has attracted great attention from both practitioners and scholars. During the current financial and economic crisis, there have been various protest movements in many European countries. In this paper, which employsdata from theEuropean Social Surveyand analyzes some European countries using a longitudinal study (2002-2012), I measure unconventional political participation considering three types of action -signed a petition, participated in a lawful demonstration and joined aboycott.By linkingcitizens to government ideology and votefor party government to political action through a multilevel model,this paper argues that both ideology and citizens’ electoral choiceshave a bearing on unconventional political participation. In times of crisis,government choicesdo not feed the level ofunconventional political participation. However, differences emerge in terms of political behavior when I consider citizens’ ideology, loser status and government ideology
.