Why Bother?: Rethinking Participation in Elections and Protests

Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics

by S. Erdem Aytaç, Susan C. Stokes

Why do vote-suppression efforts sometimes fail? Why does police repression of demonstrators sometimes turn localized protests into massive, national movements? How do politicians and activists manipulate people's emotions to get them involved? The authors of Why Bother? offer a new theory of why people take part in collective action in politics, and test it in the contexts of voting and protesting. They develop the idea that just as there are costs of participation in politics, there are also costs of abstention - intrinsic and psychological but no less real. That abstention can be psychically costly helps explain real-world patterns that are anomalies for existing theories, such as that sometimes increases in costs of participation are followed by more participation, not less. The book draws on a wealth of survey data, interviews, and experimental results from a range of countries, including the United States, Britain, Brazil, Sweden, and Turkey.

Genres: Political Science, Politics

174 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 10, 2019

Reviews

[Manaal · Rating 3 out of 5]

Polisci book I had to read for a book report for one of my classes
- interesting and convincing argument
- love the little summary sections (helped me so much in getting the main point and adding it to my book review)
- I hate when authors say their simple points in complicated language but this book is a bit better and not as bad as other academic authors in doing that