A political or ideological principle of deliberately refusing to participate in something like voting or government institutions.
Formed from 'abstention' plus the suffix '-ism' (a system or practice), emerging in the 19th century to describe coordinated political withdrawal strategies, particularly in Irish and Italian radical politics.
Irish revolutionaries in the 1880s practiced abstentionism by refusing to take their elected seats in Parliament, using their absence as a powerful statement against British rule—a protest so controversial it split their movement.
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