Introduction
To what extend does democracy needs participating citizens which are well informed about
politics? Participatory democratic theorists such as Pateman (1970) and Barber (1984) high-
light the importance of citizens participation in democracies because nobody else but the citi-
zens are best qualified to govern themselves. However there are other voices as well which
express a mistrust in citizens’ capability in self-governing and see (representative) democracy
less idealistic as certain institutional mechanisms to select good leadership (Schumpeter 1950,
Sartori 1997). In the first case, participation is a goal in itself, in the latter case citizens in-
volvement is limited to cast a vote every so often. The aim of this paper is not to try to solve
the question of the nature of democracy in a purely normative way but to define normative
conditions when low turnout and low cognitive involvement possibly matters which then can
be tested empirically.
I will argue in this paper that participation and information matters for democracy under
two conditions:
1. Information and turnout has to be socially biased in a systematic way, which decreases
the likelihood of participation and being informed for some social groups.
2. This bias in information and turnout has to lead to a bias in political outcomes which
means that due to differences in political preferences between voters and non-voters
and citizens with high and low information, the outcome would have been different if
all citizens had been well informed and voted as well.
It will be important to fulfil the two conditions at the same time. Take the example of so-
cial policies. Lets say that the condition 1 is fulfilled, and less well off citizens participate less
but lets then assume then the outcome of a social policy is not biased towards the better off it
will be hard to argue that there is a problem.
Concerns about non-participation has been growing in the past years. There is a general
agreement in participation research, that turnout is declining although the decline has not been
dramatic (Franklin 2002, Wattenberg 2000). In addition we have several ‘second-order’ elec-
tions such as local elections, mid-term elections in the US or European Parliament elections
where turnout has been even lower than in the national parliament election in the correspond-
ing country. But people do not only participate rather selectively, we know as well that citi-
zens are to a large degree poorly informed about politics (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996).
1
Convention