Postcards or Porches, Close Friends or County Fairs: A New Theory of Political Participation Under Social Risk

Abstract

Social risk is inherent to political participation. Activists have difficult political conversations with the people they love. They knock on strangers’ doors to persuade them to take political action. They protest in the streets, express their opinions on social media, and testify in public forums. All of these activities require self-revelation. Where the activist and their audience disagree, social alienation is possible, particularly in the contemporary American context where issue moralization and affective polarization are at their peak. Existing scholarship has focused exclusively on understanding how social risk helps locate people along a participatory continuum. According to this model, those who face high social risks participate “less” and those who face fewer social risks participate “more”. This model is unnecessarily reductive and, in some cases, misleading. In this mixed methods dissertation, I propose a novel theory of political participation under social risk called the theory of selective participation. My theory asserts that as perceived social risk increases, people narrow the scope of audiences and activities they are willing to engage with. When people have consistent access to participatory opportunities within that narrowed scope, they can and do maintain high levels of participation. When they run out of opportunities within that narrowed scope, they participate less, consistent with previous scholarship. In this dissertation I also show that different types of social risk concerns create qualitatively different forms of political participation, producing the variety of participatory patterns we observe in the political world. Finally, I explain how people can become more or less selective in their participation over time through a dynamic response process that reacts to both their personal experiences and shifting social contexts.