Resumen de New participation, new instruments: the construction of equivalent measures of political participation
Developments in the modes and levels in which European citizens participate in politics urge for a revision of the instruments used to measure political participation in cross country comparative research. With this goal, the paper explores the latent structure of political participation by using the stochastic cumulative scale analysis procedure proposed by Robert Mokken. Applying this procedure to the pooled European Social Survey dataset shows the existence of two dimensions and therefore the opportunity to construct two scales. The first one includes actions related to the electoral process; the second one contains protest forms of participation. These two scales are tested for a large number of countries in order to find out whether the scales can be considered to establish an identity-set of actions with cross-national validity. To overcome the limitations implied in the use of identical indicators cross nationally, in the next step the identity-set is used as the basis to include national-specific items in the instruments. As a result, the final measure of political participation developed here combines a cross-national, identical set of indicators for all countries as well as a set of nation-specific indicators. In this way, non-identical but equivalent scales are obtained for reliable and valid measurement of political participation in cross-national research. The external validity of the scales obtained is explored by applying the measures to differences in political participation across countries.
