So I've characterized mass public political participation as something arising in the context of modernity, which eh, yes and no, and we need to elaborate on this.
For example, what about Athenian democracy? Or Roman republicanism?
We're trying to describe a larger narrative, with an aim to trace the trajectory of events spanning thousands of years. As such there are always exceptions, such as the practice of popular political participation in the ancient world. Oftentimes the exceptions offer the most illumination.
Even in the midst of the Peloponnesian War, it could be observed that the Athenians did democracy better than many modern societies, for better or worse in that time. Though they were collectively steering themselves into ruin, accounts of that time reveal that their society had an incredible level of self-criticism and freedom of expression, even in the depths of the war, with poets and playwrights expressing compassion for their enemies and sharply criticizing their society's policies and tendencies.
At the same time, democracy, or at least the performance of the image of democracy, is something much more widely practiced and situated in the modern context. We could draw from an analogue here: the historical development of capitalism.
Markets, credit, money...these things have existed at least as long as civilization, and capitalism itself has winked in and out of existence here and there, such as in Renaissance Italy, but it did not begin to take hold as the material basis of society until the 1600's or 1700's or so. And capitalism existing now is a different beast than what it was when it was just getting started.
Just as Athenian democracy was something else entirely, and our mass democracies now are oftentimes derided as charades dressing up the rule of oligarchs. That's another story for another time.
