Sources of Local Political Involvement

Abstract

Despite the legal norm of universal adult citizenship in the United States, and thus the legitimacy of participation by all strata of society, the actual level of political involvement in local communities is not high and differs greatly from group to group. Our task here is to spell out some of the conditions of group membership which contribute to local political involvement. Our broader purpose is to argue the need to re-expand the theoretical framework for analysis of political participation and thus to correct the present imbalanced focus upon participation as an individual act. Thus we shall examine some structural, rather than psychological, conditions of local political involvement. In this we shall occasionally use some measures previously reported in other studies and conventionally regarded as tapping psychological attributes of individuals; but these we shall regard as defining sets of role-expectations or as locating categories of persons placed within a certain range of normative obligations; and, more importantly, we shall systematically compare the net effect (upon local political involvement) of such variables with that of the more conventionally defined structural variables.