Political Participation is More than Just Resources: A New Approach to the Study of Civic Engagement

Existing survey-based studies of political participation can be grouped into those that model participation in each activity independently (with most of them focusing on voter turnout), and those that model overall participation based on aggregate indicators of civic engagement. In this paper I develop and apply a new approach for the study of civic engagement based on simultaneous modeling of participation in multiple political activities. I use finite mixture modeling to allow model parameters to vary across latent citizen types and to classify survey respondents into apathetic and activist classes of citizens. Specifically, I use Bayesian methods to estimate mixture models where the skewness of the linked function is allowed to vary across latent classes, and multilevel modeling to allow coefficients to vary across political activities. Using survey data from the 1990 American Citizen Participation Study, I find that even after controlling for a comprehensive set of individual attributes, large heterogeneities in political participation still remain. Also, I find that the impact of individual attributes such as education varies considerably across citizen types depending on the characteristics of each political activity.