Responsiveness of the elected towards the electorate is understood as a crucial component of democratic government. Since the ideal will seldom be fully achieved in practice, people may be more or less dissatisfied with the way their concerns are represented by political institutions and actors, and a situation like this can be characterized as a failure in democratic performance.
As stated by Albert O. Hirschman, people may react differently to perceived failures of organizational performance. Some will remain loyal and attempt to improve the organization’s performance by cooperating and/or mobilizing resources for the organization (loyalty). Others will rely on protest against a perceived decline of organizational performance. Still others will leave the organization or cut their relationship to it. While Hirschman considered protest as a typical reaction to declining political performance, research on political participation has shown that all three types of reactions to failing performance of the political system can and will occur in democracy.
The paper aims to use Hirschman’s idea as a starting point of a comparison of the relationship between discontent with parliamentary representation and political participation in France and Germany. The two countries under scrutiny provide interesting cases of comparison for several reasons. Most importantly, exit, voice and loyalty have traditionally played a different role as forms of political behavior in these two countries, with protest having played a more important role in France. Moreover, whether people rely on exit rather than on voice may not only depend on national cultural traditions, but also on the individual’s access to socioeconomic resources and motivation to become active. Regarded from this point of view, comparing the determinants of varying types of reactions to political dissatisfaction is also interesting in the case of France and Germany, since protest seems to occur more frequently in the issue area of old politics in France, but more strongly related to new politics issues in Germany. Accordingly, protest will rather be an instrument of expressing political discontent by all social strata in France than. In Germany, it will primarily be used by the well to do middle classes who are primarily concerned about new politics issues.
The validity of these assumptions will be tested by using a representative sample of French and German respondents surveyed in winter 2011.
