Towards an Attitudinal Theory of Political Participation

Sidney Verba and Norman H. Nie's Participation in America is a landmark contribution to the political participation literature in three ways: because of (1) their investigation of the structure of participation, (2) their sophisticated multivariate analysis of its sources, and (3) their attempt to examine its consequences.' This article, however, suggests two problems with the second of Verba and Nie's concerns. First, they tend to focus on who participates rather than on why people participate, emphasizing social characteristics at the expense of attitudinal factors which might provide a more proximate and empirically more powerful explanation of participation.2 Second, when Verba and Nie do introduce psychological variables, either the variables themselves (civic mindedness and information) or the way they are incorporated (efficacy and interest) raise conceptual and theoretical problems.3