Uncertainty and political participation

The minimax regret model of decision making under uncertainty, which was proposed by Ferejohn and Fiorina (1974) as a model of the voting decision, is here generalized to encompass forms of political participation (such as contributing money or time to a campaign) in which the range of alternatives is continuous. A principal implication of the model is that aggregate campaign contributions may be substantially increased by limiting the amount that any one individual can contribute. The conditions under which the behavior of a minimax regret decision maker can be unambiguously distinguished from that of an expected utility maximizer are also specified.     

Corrupt political jurisdictions and voter participation

An FBI investigation of county purchasing activities in the mid 1980s resulted in the conviction of 55 of Mississippi's 410 county supervisors. Analyzing data from the state's 1987 county supervisor elections and hypothesizing that candidates' demands for votes increase as the gains from holding public office increase, we predict larger voter turnouts in the 26 of the state's 82 counties where supervisor corruption was exposed. Holding constant average voter turnout in the preceding U.S. presidential election and controlling for the competitiveness of supervisor races, we find that more Mississippians indeed voted in corrupt than in non-corrupt counties.     

Conceptualizations of good citizenship and political participation

Theorists have variously defined what it means to be a good citizen. But how do citizensthemselves views their responsibilities? And is there any relationship between a person's view of citizenship and his or her political participation? This paper uses a combination of methods to explore these issues. A Q method study reveals four citizenship perspectives that provide evidence for striking differences in how people define the participatory responsibilities of a good citizen. An exploratory survey analysis finds that the four citizenship perspectives are significantly related to political behavior, even when socioeconomic status and attitudinal variables related to participation are controlled. While adding to our understanding of participation, these findings also underscore the importance of investigating the conceptualizations of citizens to gain more complete understandings of how political systems work.     

Gender,political participation and electoral systems: A cross‐national analysis

This article investigates whether the smaller gender gaps in political engagement, found in more proportional electoral systems, translate into smaller gender differences in political participation. Using data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, it presents the argument that more proportional systems may send signals that multiple interests are included in the policy‐making process, which may increase women's levels of political participation and thereby reduce gender gaps. Additionally, the article tests for the possibility that a greater number of political parties and the elected representatives they provide act as barriers to political participation that have a greater impact on women's levels of participation than men's. It is argued that women's lower levels of political resources and engagement might create more difficult barriers for them than for men. Results lend little support for the first hypothesis, but a greater confirmation for the second.     

Political participation,political action and political identities: young d/deaf people's perspectives

This paper critically examines the dominant, and predominantly negative, discourses around young people's political participation, or supposed lack of it. Drawing upon contemporary debates about young people within geography, political science and sociology, it considers the ways in which a redefinition of what constitutes ‘the political’ is required if young people's engagement in political participation is to be understood fully. The paper reports on research conducted with young D/deaf people that did not intentionally set out to research their political participation, action or identi ties, but which uncovered a range of political aspects in their lives and experiences. It explores the ways in which volunteering can be defined as political action and, after de Certeau and Scott, how the use of British Sign Language can be a resistive act, a tactic or weapon of the weak. Threaded throughout the paper is a consideration of the ways in which there are complex geographies of activism at play.     

Democratic and aggressive political participation: Estimation of a nonrecursive model

Previous empirical research concerning political participation has made either one of two errors. In the first case, the research has omitted aggressive or extralegal forms of political participation. In the second case, the research included aggressive forms of participation but estimated models of aggressive and democratic participation separately despite the strong positive correlation between them. Each error leads to an incorrectly specified model of political participation. To correct this situation, we specify a nonrecursive model and test it using data from two disparate sample surveys. In each test the results indicate that earlier participation models were incorrectly specified in that aggressive behavior is a significant cause of democratic participation while the reverse is not true.     

Asian Americans for equality: A case study of strategies for expanding immigrant homeownership

Abstract

At a time when the overall homeownership rate in the United States is at a historic high, many groups still face severe hurdles in realizing the American dream. The public, private, and nonprofit sectors are working to address these barriers, and this article examines one nonprofit's activities. Asian Americans for Equality (AAFE) is a civil rights and housing organization providing homeownership and other services to Asian Americans, a group that often faces language, cultural, credit, and financial difficulties in achieving homeownership.

AAFE addresses these challenges by providing aggressive outreach through housing fairs and neighborhood publications; it offers homeownership education and counseling in a variety of languages and settings, secures multiple housing subsidies and develops affordable housing, and educates lenders on the employment and credit practices of the Asian community. AAFE thus helps tailor the complex web of activities required to expand homeownership to traditionally underserved—especially immigrant—populations.     

From occupational involvement to political participation: An exploratory analysis

Since Mill and Tocqueville, theorists have speculated that local participation, particularly involvement in workplace decision making, contributes to participation in wider politics. Theory suggests there should be two types of relationships between work and politics. First, there should be a correspondence between similarly formal or authoritative occupational and political involvements. Second, occupational participation should generate political participation. Thus, both authority patterns and actual participation connect work to politics.This paper hypothesizes that, other things being equal, occupational involvement, such as authority and participation at work, generates wider political participation, and that this influence occurs most strongly across levels of similar formality between the occupational and political spheres. The study finds that work participation, in fact, generates political participation, and that the connection is strongest along a hierarchy of formality connecting participation from the workplace to politics.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Panel on Innovations in the 1985 National Election Study Pilot Survey, American Political Science Association, Washington, DC, August 1986.     

Protest participation and economic crisis: The conditioning role of political opportunities

The economic crisis that started in 2008 has negatively affected European nations to different degrees. The sudden rise in demonstrations particularly in those countries most hard hit by the crisis suggests that grievance theories, dismissed in favour of resource‐based models since the 1970s, might have a role to play in explaining protest behaviour. While most previous studies have tested these theories at the individual or contextual levels, it is likely that mechanisms at both levels are interrelated. To fill this lacuna, this article examines the ways in which individual‐level grievances interact with macro‐level factors to impact on protest behaviour. In particular, it examines whether the impact of individual subjective feelings of deprivation is conditional on contextual macroeconomic and policy factors. It is found that while individual‐level relative deprivation has a direct effect on the propensity to have protested in the last year, this effect is greater under certain macroeconomic and political conditions. Both significant results for the cross‐level interactions are interpreted in terms of their role for opening up political opportunities for protest among those who feel they have been most deprived in the current crisis. These findings suggest that the interaction of the contextual and individual levels should continue to be explored in future studies in order to further clarify the mechanisms underlying protest behaviour.     

Socioeconomic status,unemployment experience,and political participation: A disentangling of main and interaction effects

A clarification of the effects of unemployment on political participation attitudes and behaviors is developed by contrasting the effect of unemployment experience across categories of socioeconomic status. Data on employed and unemployed heads of household are drawn from the 1976 University of Michigan national presidential election survey. The results indicate both main and interaction effects. Regardless of employment status, lower socioeconomic status respondents are less committed to voting, feel less efficacious, are less interested in politics, and are less politically active than persons of higher status. However, participation attitudes and behaviors are more adversely affected by unemployment experience among those of lower than higher status. Among higher status respondents, attitudes toward self (i.e., feelings of efficacy) and political interest—but not political activity or attitude toward the importance of participation—are altered by unemployment.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Southwestern Sociological meetings in Ft. Worth, Texas, March 1979.     

Authoritarianism,socioethnic diversity and political participation across countries

It is argued in this article that threatening stimuli affect political participation levels among non‐authoritarians more than among authoritarians. Focusing on socioethnic diversity, which is known to be particularly threatening to authoritarians and to relate negatively to political participation in the general public, analyses of individual‐ and macro‐level data from 53 countries is presented which supports this thesis. Participation levels among authoritarians are largely static, regardless of a country's level of socioethnic heterogeneity, while non‐authoritarians participate considerably less in countries with relatively high levels of socioethnic heterogeneity. This suggests that authoritarians participate to a proportionately greater degree in the most diverse countries.     

Ladies against women: Explaining the political participation of traditional- and modern-role females

Data from the 1980 National Election Study are used to examine how well participation theory variables and group consciousness variables account for the nonvoting political activity of traditional-role women. Of the little variance in this activity that is explained by a regression analysis among these women (.070 after adjustments for number of respondents and variables, compared to .240 among modern-role women), most is due to two participation theory variables: party identification and efficacy. However, a discriminant function analysis emphasizes two group consciousness variables (gender consciousness and religious consciousness) and only one participation theory variable (political ideology) as the main forces that distinguish active traditional-role from active modern-role women. These findings indicate the need to make clear which comparison group — other traditional-role women or politically active modern-role women — is being used in efforts to understand traditional-role women's political conduct. The findings also call for new theoretical directions about traditional-role women's nonvoting participation, because of the weak explanatory ability exhibited by all fourteen variables together.