Summary

Participation through communication has been studied internationally in analyzing social change at varying levels of analysis. In modernization theory, it was used largely at the national level for analyzing media consumption and participation in democratic political institutions, particularly voting, in newly established countries. In postmodernization theory, Paulo Freire and others employed it to analyze both interpersonal interaction and community development processes. Since that time, interest in participatory processes has proliferated in a variety of community development, social movement, and other middle-level social change efforts, including some operating via social media. In addition, with increasingly urgent threats posed by pandemics, human rights violations, global warming, and other international pressures today, transnational forms of civic and political action are increasingly treated as processes of global level participation. The idea of a global political public sphere is one of these processes. Citizen representation in multilateral organizations, global social movements, and other forms of cosmopolitan action are also treated as participation. A comprehensive understanding of participatory communication in the international context must attend to social processes at various levels of analysis, ranging from local project interventions to national political processes to global change.