Suchergebnisse

Initial fears of a standstill in political participation during the COVID-19 pandemic have not come true. Nevertheless, the voices heard in politics may have changed in such a radically altered social and political context. Specifically, the current article examines whether the gender gap in political participation has widened during the pandemic, reinforcing the gendered impact of the pandemic and state measures to cope with it. To empirically assess the development and drivers of the gender gap in political participation, we rely on original survey data for Germany collected in autumn 2020 and spring 2021. Based on retrospective questions about pre-pandemic behaviour and a within-pandemic panel, our results indicate three points: (1) the COVID-19 crisis has slightly increased the gender gap in participation; (2) COVID-19-related burdens (such as increasing care obligations) have not restrained, but fostered, participation; and (3) this mobilising effect is, however, stronger among men than women.

Higher social capital is often associated with better quality of democracy (Putnam 1993, Warren 2001). Social capital is a unique type of resource in the sense that the more it is used, the more it becomes available, and therefore it is important to explore how social capital can be generated. In this paper, we evaluate the potential that churches and religious organizations present in creating social capital. We identify structural constraints faced by churches and religious organizations engaged in this process. We argue that institutional survival concerns and social understandings of the roles played by religion and church in democratic societies may influence the potential for social capital to be constructed in the context of religious participation as well as the type of generated social capital. Moreover, we also discuss the implications of epistemological choices on measuring the relationship between church participation and social capital, and advocate methodological diversity and interdisciplinary research initiatives, at times, in the detriment of generalizability.