Political participation under constraints: backlash effect or political alienation?

How do external constraints affect political participation? Current studies suggest that the loss of autonomy of governments depresses electoral participation (Steiner, 2010; Turnbull-Dugarte, 2020), while there is also evidence suggesting that public protests can arise due to the meddling of external actors in domestic policymaking (Auvinen, 1996; Reinsberg et al., 2023). Therefore, external constraints arguably both foster and depress political participation. Yet, no study, to our knowledge, examines which forms of political participation are affected in times of constraints. In this article, we make the hypothesis that only the repertoires of political participation linked with representative democracies and party politics will be negatively impacted, while alternative forms of participation, which bypass the electoral process in general, and representatives in particular, should not be affected or should increase. To test these hypotheses, we employ two empirical strategies. First, based on ESS data from 2002 to 2020 in fifteen western countries, we assess how individual-level variables moderate the effects of EU intervention on satisfaction with democracy. Second, we use data from an original survey fielded in Belgium in 2019 which includes measures of perceptions of constraints but also items measuring political participation with sociodemographic information. Our results have implications for theories linking international integration, government constraints and democratic politics.