Political Participation in Britain: a Research Agenda for a New Study

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Abstract
HISTORICALLY SPEAKING, THE THEME OF POLITICAL PARTICIpation and the set of issues connected with it are as old as politics itself, because they touch on some of the most central and perennial questions of political life – who decides, where are the boundaries of community and citizenship to be drawn, who benefits, how will decisions be made? However, beyond this, participation has from time to time become a particularly central and salient issue in British politics. In the seventeenth century the issues revolved around the ‘claims of the gentry and merchant classes to play a larger part in the making of government policy’. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the issue moved on to representation of the nonropertied classes – the town worker, the rural worker and Etterly universal suffrage.

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