Commentary on “Attitudes, Opportunities and Incentives: A Field Essay on Political Participation”

In "Attitudes, Opportunities and Incentives," I provided a critical review of both the theoretical issues and empirical evidence regarding the determinants and consequences of participation, emphasizing three points in conclusion. First, our participation models must explicitly incorporate mobilization factors rather than exclusively focus on socioeconomic status (SES). second, we must shift the focus of our study to alternative forms of participation. And third, several critical issues of conceptualization and interpretation of formal models (and their related empirical tests) must be addressed. Because of the unique nature of my original essay as a review, I will comment a bit more than other essays in this issue on how the field has progressed on the points that I raised more than a decade ago rather than focusing on the essay's intellectual origins or import per se. I must begin, however, with the obvious observation that when a review essay enjoys a high citation count, it undoubtedly reflects the nature of knowledge in our discipline as much as any unique intellectual contribution. Our discipline is both increasingly diverse and increasingly specialized. The number of "discipline-specific" journals being published has increased in the past few decades, as have the pressures for publishing in them as a requisite of earning tenure. Citing a review essay can help motivate an argument, reference widely supported empirical findings, or justify a conclusion and in doing so, can be much like a picture: worth a thousand words.1 Review essays thus provide for a certain efficient use of resources in disciplines that are indeed substantial and cumulative: the value of the nuances of any single study is often overshadowed by whatever consistent knowledge we have accumulated over a range of studies. In this regard, I largely attribute the high citation count of my essay to the intellectual curiosity and scholarly excellence of those who wrote before me. Certainly foremost among these are Steven Rosenstone and John Mark Hansen, whose 1993 book Mobilization, Participation and Democracy in America both anticipated and illustrated two of my key points: the critical theoretical importance of mobilization and the need to study participation other than voter turnout more extensively. Rosenstone and Hansen, of course, creatively used more than forty years of American National Election Study data on electoral and nonelectoral participation to provide some empirical evidence on these points. Their publication just prior to my essay necessarily bolstered any argument I made as to the importance of mobilization to understanding who participates and how they do so.2 Key to my observation that mobilization must be integrated into our theories of participation was my criticism of identifying what I believed to be two critical assumptions of the literature's dominant SES model. That model conceptualizes participation as a reflection of individuals' resources (e.g., education and income) and civic orientations. The first assumption inherent in the SES model is that attitudes precede behavior. This assumption points to the importance of using alternative types of research design in testing theories of participation. My observation at the time was, in essence, a criticism of using cross-sectional survey designs to study time-ordered causal processes. Related, cross-sectional observations of attitudes, participation, and mobilization cannot resolve the problem that opportunities to participate are not equally or randomly distributed in the population, a second assumption of the SES model. The example that I used in the essay was that of petition signing: if survey respondents note that they have not signed any petitions, is that because they chose not to participate, or is that because they were never asked to sign a petition? It is probably not unreasonable to assume equal or random participation opportunities in studying voter turnout-most elections occur in a regular cycle, and the election schedule and voting locations and procedures are generally known or knowable-but certainly this is not the case for most other types of participation. …