Social Participation and Voting Turnout: A Multivariate Analysis

Abstract

As an explanation of voting turnout, the theory argues that involvement by individuals in nonpolitical organizations such as voluntary associations community affairs, and churches will in turn mobilize them to become politically active. Survey data from Indianapolis show marked correlations between all the above forms of and voting turnout in three recent elections. The partial correlations for each of these measures, controlling the others, remain significant, indicating that each form of has independent effects on voting. This is not true with informal interaction among friends and neighbors, however. Evidence for inferring a causal linkage from to voting turnout is found in the fact that most respondents belonged to voluntary associations prior to these elections. Finally, the relationship between and voting remains moderately strong after the compounding variables of age, education, political contacts through the mass media and political parties, and political orientations such as political interest and party identification are all held constant. The mean multiple R with all predictor variables is .58. POLITICAL democracy assumes that citizens will exercise their franchise on election day. Yet millions in the United States regularly fail to vote. Presidential elections typically attract only about 60 percent of the voting-age population (the estimated figure for the 1968 Presidential election was 62 percent); off-year Congressional elections generally draw less than 50 percent (the estimated figure for 1966 was 46 percent); and separate state and local elections usually have even lower turnouts. Why so many people fail to vote is a critical problem for democratic political theory and for understanding political behavior. A host of empirical studies, beginning with Merriam and Gosnell's (1924) examination of the 1923 Chicago mayoral election, have investigated relationships between voting turnout and various and political variables, to discover what kinds of people fail to vote. This research has established that voting turnout in the United States is commonly related to such factors as sex, age, race, marital status, religious preference, education, occupational status, income, membership and in voluntary associations, exposure to the mass media, political involvement of one's parents, contacts by political parties, political discussions with friends, interest in politics, strength of party preference, and feelings of political efficacy.' In recent years such writers as Lane (1959), Lipset (1954, 1960), and IMiilbrath (1965) have offered numerous theoretical explanations of the relationships between these factors and voting turnout, but none of them have subsequently been adequately tested. This paper focuses on just one of these competing theoretical explanations, which I term the social participation theory, but subjects it to rigorous empirical analysis. This analysis proceeds in three stages: (a) determining relationships between voting turnout and various measures of participtaion, both separately and in combination; (b) exploring the theory's relevance as a causal argument; and (c)