Sidney Verba

Beyond SES: A Resource Model of Political Participation

This paper develops a resource model of political participation. The resources considered are time, money, and civic skills—those communications and organizational capacities that are essential to political activity. These skills are not only acquired early in life but developed in the nonpolitical institutional settings of adult life: the workplace, organizations, and churches and synagogues. These resources are distributed differentially among groups defined by socioeconomic status. A two-stage least squares analysis shows these resources have powerful effects on overall political activity, thus explaining why socioeconomic status has traditionally been so powerful in predicting participation. We disaggregate overall activity into three kinds of acts: those that involve giving time, those that entail donating money, and voting. Each requires a different configuration of resources resulting in different patterns of stratification across various political acts.

Knowing and Caring about Politics: Gender and Political Engagement

This paper demonstrates that women are less politically interested, informed, and efficacious than men and that this gender gap in political engagement has consequences for political participation. Only when gender differences in political interest, information, and efficacy are considered along with gender differences in resources can we explain the relatively small disparity between the sexes with respect to political activity. When we searched for the origins of the gender gap in political engagement, we found that it can be explained only partially by gender differences in factors such as education that are associated with political engagement Furthermore, these gender differences in political orientation seem to be specific to politics-rather than the manifestation of general personal attributes Investigation of the extent to which the cues received by males and females that politics is a mans world are responsible for the gender gap in political engagement yielded results that were suggestive, but mixed.

Race, Ethnicity and Political Resources: Participation in the United States

This article uses data from the Citizen Participation Study – a large-scale survey of the voluntary activity of the American public designed to oversample African-Americans and Latinos as well as political activists – to inquire about the extent and sources of differences in levels of political activity among African-Americans, Latinos and Anglo-Whites. Considering a variety of political acts, we find that, in the aggregate, African-Americans are slightly, and Latinos are substantially, less active than Anglo-Whites. However, the resources that facilitate participation – some of which, for example, education, are related to social class and others of which, for example, religious preference and activity are associated with race or ethnicity – are distributed very unevenly across the three groups, with Latinos at a particular disadvantage. After accounting for differences in politically relevant resources, there is no significant difference among the three groups in political participation.

Prospecting for Participants: Rational Expectations and the Recruitment of Political Activists

A survey of the American public is used to model citizen political recruitment as a two-stage process. First, those who recruit others to become active in politics seek likely activists through “rational prospecting.” Second, they seek acquiescence to their requests. We model each part of the process, delineating the characteristics of individuals that make them attractive prospects and that make them likely to say “yes.” Recruiters who have information about, and leverage over, their targets are more likely to be successful. In seeking out people who would be likely not only to participate but also to participate effectively, rational prospectors select people with characteristics that are already overrepresented among participants. The net result of the recruitment process for political activity in general—and for financial contributions, in particular—is to exacerbate participatory stratification.

Gender and the Pathways to Participation: The Role of Resources

In this investigation of the voluntary participation of men and women, we find that even when the definition of activity is broadened beyond the electoral forms of activity usually considered, men are a bit more active in politics than women. However, the pattern across activities does not conform to the expectations generated by the literature. In comparison with men, women are disadvantaged when it comes to the resources that facilitate political activity. When these resource deficits are viewed in the context of the paths to participation taken by men and women, it turns out that if women were as well endowed with political resources as men, their overall levels of political activity would be closer to mens and their financial contributions would be considerably closer to mens.

Weapon of the Strong? Participatory Inequality and the Internet

What is the impact of the possibility of political participation on the Internet on long-standing patterns of participatory inequality in American politics? An August 2008 representative survey of Americans conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project provides little evidence that there has been any change in the extent to which political participation is stratified by socio-economic status, but it suggests that the web has ameliorated the well-known participatory deficit among those who have just joined the electorate. Even when only that subset of the population with Internet access is considered, participatory acts such as contributing to candidates, contacting officials, signing a political petition, or communicating with political groups are as stratified socio-economically when done on the web as when done offline. The story is different for stratification by age where historically younger people have been less engaged than older people in most forms of political participation. Young adults are much more likely than their elders to be comfortable with electronic technologies and to use the Internet, but among Internet users, the young are not especially politically active. How these trends play out in the future depends on what happens to the current Web-savvy younger generation and the cohorts that follow and on the rapidly developing political capacities of the Web. Stay logged on …

Would the Dream of Political Equality Turn out to Be a Nightmare

Studies of citizen participation often assume that widespread and equal participation is beneficial for democracy. This article examines the arguments for and against equal citizen participation: although it may lead to lower-quality participation-less informed, less supportive of democracy-it also leads to a distortion of the needs and preferences of citizens as they are communicated into the political process.

What Happened at Work Today?: A Multistage Model of Gender, Employment, and Political Participation

This paper proposes a multistage, interactive model that takes into account selection processes into nonpolitical institutions, processes by which participatory factors are allocated within institutions, and the forward linkage to political activity to explain the small but persistent gender gap in political participation. Using OLS regression and simulation to analyze a large-scale survey containing detailed measures of both workplace experiences and political participation, we find that women are less likely than men to accumulate participatory factors on the job because they are less likely to be in the workforce at all, to be in the workforce full-time, or to be in high-level jobs. The net effect of these processes is that a substantial fraction of the gender gap in political activity can be explained by gender differences in workplace experiences.

Public Opinion and the War in Vietnam

Foreign policy seems to command more public attention than domestic policy and yet—insofar as it has been, researched—public opinion on foreign policy seems to have less impact on governmental decisions than does opinion in most other issue areas. There are at least two reasons, one normative and one empirical, why public opinion can be regarded as pertinent to some foreign policy questions—especially those associated with “life and death.” Normatively, it is desirable for political leaders in a democracy to commit national resources in ways generally approved by the populace. Large scale military commtiments should, if at all possible, meet with the approval of public opinion. Empirically, if they do not, experience has shown there are circumstances in which public disapproval of the course of foreign policy may be registered in national elections. Specifically, our one recent experience with a situation of partial mobilization and a limited but large-scale and indefinite commitment to military action in Korea did in time produce a distribution of opinion that suggested the war was very unpopular. And though its precise impact on the 1952 presidential election is difficult to assess there is little doubt that the Korean issue contributed significantly to the Eisenhower landslide. Among the questions raised by the Korean experience is whether the American public will easily tolerate the prosecution of long drawn-out wars of partial mobilization. Therefore, it is not surprising that another such war, in Vietnam, has stimulated a concern with public opinion.

The Citizen as Respondent: Sample Surveys and American Democracy Presidential Address, American Political Science Association, 1995

citizen participation is the main way in which the public communicates its needs and preferences to the I government and induces the government to be responsive. Since participation depends on resources and resources are unequally distributed, the resulting communication is a biased representation of the public. Thus, the democratic ideal of equal consideration is violated. Sample surveys provide the closest approximation to an unbiased representation of the public because participation in a survey requires no resources and because surveys eliminate the selection bias inherent in the fact that participants in politics are self-selected. The contrast between the participatory process and the sample survey is used to highlight the nature of the bias in the former. Surveys, however, are not seen as a practical way of providing more equal representation.