Participation and Multisubjective Understanding: An Interpretivist Approach to the Study of Political Participation

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Abstract
While traditional political theorists have long disputed the meaning of "political participation," scientific students of participation have agreed on an instrumentalist understanding, defining "participation" as an episodic public act of private individuals in the pursuit of their wants. Political scientists need to be more epistemologically self-conscious when they conceptualize "participation" if they are to avoid constraining both the collection and the analysis of the data with a priori liberal-Hobbesian assumptions. Since participatory acts are not naturalistic "brute facts," their very existence in the world of human action depends on the conceptual template through which this world is examined. As long as political scientists continue simply to operationalize their own concept of "participation," their methodology will prevent them from seeing the plural forms that participation in fact takes in the world. Whether acts (of an American voter or demonstrator, a French revolutionary, a Muslim revolutionary, a Solidarity member, and so on) count as acts of participation depends on those actors' subjective understanding of what they are doing (although not necessarily on their "intentions" or "expectations"). If political scientists want to understand the "participation" of conceptually distinct groups of actors, they must describe and explain political acts, events, and states of affairs from those actors' conceptually distinct points of view.

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