Who's Afraid of the Big, Bad Firm: The Impact of Economic Scale on Political Participation

There is a considerable body of theoretical literature that argues that the nature of economic structure (e.g. the function, size, ownership, diversity, and location of firms) has a powerful effect on community politics and on social networks and norms which may affect politics. Specifically, many claim that manifestations of increasing economic scale such as larger firm size, more commuting, and less independent business ownership disrupt a community's social fabric which, in turn, results in political disengagement among community members. Despite these assertions, there have been few efforts to empirically assess the effect of economic context on mass-level political participation. This article seeks to investigate several of these propositions about the effect of economic scale. These propositions are empirically tested using a cross-level data set created by integrating the 1996 National Election Study with information about each respondent's community economic context collected from various sources. These analyses reveal that, contrary to many contemporary claims, retail size, retail density, and independent ownership have little effect on political participation. Commuting, however, does have a strong effect on political participation, but it is the aggregate level of commuting within one's community that apparently matters more than one's own commuting status. n 1994, 700 citizens of the small New England town of Sturbridge, Massachusetts, turned out to vote in a local referendum. At stake was whether Wal-Mart would be allowed to build a new superstore in their community. After the votes were tallied, Wal-Mart's bid to locate in the community was rejected overwhelmingly. Among the many press accounts detailing the pitched battle between the citizens and the superstore was one that noted that the community activists opposed not just Wal-Marts specifically but all "sprawl-marts" that "suck . everyday social life out of small communities" (Goodman 1994). Several months later, in an article surveying the more than 100 battles in which Wal-Mart was then engaged with local communities over the location of superstores, another journalist noted that Wal-Marts were feared not just because of the economic effects of their arrival in local communities, but because they "represent Main Street merchants who can't support the Boy Scouts, the soccer league and the Rotary Club because the megastore has driven them out of business" (Walters 1995). In both press accounts, the journalists and the activists that they quote make explicit claims that some change in the economic scale of their community (in this case, the introduction of large retailers) powerfully affects the civic life of the community. Such speculation is not confined to journalists and civic activists either. In his 1994 Nobel Symposium paper, "Bowling Alone," Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam suggested that "the changes in scale that have swept over the American economy in these years-illustrated by the replacement of the corner grocery by the supermarket and now perhaps of the supermarket by electronic shopping-athome, or the replacement of community-based enterprises by outposts of distant multinational firms-may perhaps have undermined the material and even physical basis for civic engagement" (1994, 25). Like the commu-