Political Participation

This paper proposes the theory that more competition may lead to a higher level of political participation, and will explain problems that may arise when studying this theory. Thus the paper looks at the potential of reverse causality and confounding variables while still explaining the theory. The paper concludes that the due to confounding variables the relationship was not as strong as originally though, but there is still a relationship despite that.
To begin I will show why this is worthy of study. It seems like political participation varies as there is no reason for it to remain stable. If it varies it seems worthy of studying why. This seems even more important as modern democracies depend on participation from their populations to

Then the independent variable will be competition, while the dependent variable will be public participation. Competition is defined as two or more things attempting to achieve a goal, in which there is only one winner. It is more competitive when the things are closer to each other, in terms of their ability to win, and less competitive when they are further away. For the case of the question, competition should only be used to define things that are of a political nature, as it does not follow that the competition in a sports game would affect the political participation. Political participation is defined as the act of participating in political activities. This paper holds that the two variables are casually linked, as it follows that with increased competition there is an increased desire to help push forward your desired out come on the issue, thus you elect to be more politically active. Therefore it seems that competition and political activity have a positive

For this theory the dependent variable is public participation, will be measured with voter turnout. Voter turnout measures the percentage of a population that elects to vote. Voting is a way to participate politically; therefore voter turnout is a measure of political participation. But for this piece the voter turnout measured must relate back to the opinion poll, thus what is measured is the voter turnout for a vote on an issue discussed by one of these polls. Hence what are to be measured are variations in opinion polls, and the perceived level of competition between the variables, and turnout on votes that respond to this