Abstract

For the past 40 years, scholars have been concerned with the decreasing electoral turnout in established democracies such as Canada. Around the same time, political participation occurring outside of state-sanctioned avenues – otherwise called unconventional forms of political participation – appeared to be increasing. As citizen participation is a core ingredient of democracy, it is important that we strive to understand how Canadians participate and why. Yet, the literature offers no consensus about what is driving Canadians to what forms of unconventional political participation, nor what that could mean for Canadian democracy. This thesis asks what unconventional political participation looks like in Canada, what drives it, and what the implications of those findings are. Using Easton’s Systems Theory as a framework, this study contextualizes unconventional political participation as a consequence of the larger political system’s outputs to explore the role of political support in the various forms of political participation. The survey data used in the analysis is from the Political Communities Survey Project 2017 dataset. By conducting analyses that consider both voters and nonvoters separately, this thesis demonstrates that Canada is not facing a shift away from electoral participation, but rather a broadening of the repertoire of actions used by citizens who already participate electorally. It also concludes that political support plays a different role in electoral participation than unconventional participation, but that in both cases, increased support generally leads to increased participation. In sum, unconventional participation in Canada is more so evidence of an engaged citizenry than a dissented one.