Société québécoise de science politique Dimensions of Political Participation in a Canadian Sample Author(s): Susan Welch Source: Canadian Journal of Political Science / Revue canadienne de science politique, Vol. 8, No. 4 (Dec., 1975), pp. 553-559 Published by: Canadian Political Science Association and the Société québécoise de science politique Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3230685 . Accessed: 12/06/2014 13:39 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Canadian Political Science Association and Société québécoise de science politique are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Canadian Journal of Political Science / Revue canadienne de science politique. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 62.122.76.54 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 13:39:08 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
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Société québécoise de science politique
Dimensions of Political Participation in a Canadian SampleAuthor(s): Susan WelchSource: Canadian Journal of Political Science / Revue canadienne de science politique, Vol. 8,No. 4 (Dec., 1975), pp. 553-559Published by: Canadian Political Science Association and the Société québécoise de science politiqueStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3230685 .
Accessed: 12/06/2014 13:39
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
.
Canadian Political Science Association and Société québécoise de science politique are collaborating withJSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Canadian Journal of Political Science / Revue canadienne descience politique.
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Dimensions of Political Participation in a Canadian Sample*
SUSAN WELCH University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Recent works have compared political par- ticipation in a variety of democratic poli- ties.1 One major finding of some of this research is that to classify individuals as
*The data analysed here were gathered in a project on the effects of urban crowding funded by the Ministry of State for Urban Affairs and directed by Alan Booth. The views expressed in the paper, however, are solely those of the author and not neces- sarily those of the Ministry. The author would like to thank Alan Booth for his comments on the paper. 1See for example, Sidney Verba, Norman Nie, and Jae-on Kim, The Modes of Demo- cratic Participation: A Cross National Com- parison (Beverly Hills, Calif. 1971) which compares Austria, India, Japan, the United States, and Nigeria. The latter nation hardly qualified as "democratic," although at the time the survey was done full mili- tary control had not been established. For a review of comparative political participa- tion in five nations (Germany, Italy, Mex- ico, the United Kingdom, and the United States) see Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture (Princeton 1963) and Norman Nie, G. Bingham Powell, Jr, and Kenneth Prewitt, "Social Structure and Political Participation: Developmental Re- lationships, I and In," in American Political Science Review, 63 (June and September 1969), 361-78 and 808-31.
highly active or inactive politically is to oversimplify the notion of participation.2 Political participation is multidimensional: active participants in one kind of political behaviour may be inactive in another. Pre- occupation with one form of participation, such as voting, may obscure the extent and nature of participation taking place.3 This finding was summarized neatly in a recent work: "Citizens differ not only in the over- all amounts of participation they perform but also as to the types of acts in which they choose to engage. Furthermore, these different types of acts are quite distinctive in form and function and can almost be thought of as alternative participatory systems: - systems that are used for dif- ferent purposes, that are able to provide types of benefits, and that relate the par- ticipant to his government and to his fel- low citizens in fundamentally different ways."4 Surprisingly, perhaps, these types of participation have been found to be
2Verba, Nie, and Kim, Modes of Demo- cratic Participation, passim 3For a statement of the importance of ex- amining forms of participation other than voting, see L6on Dion, "Participating in the Political Process," Queen's Quarterly 75 (Autumn 1968), 432-8. 4Verba, Nie, and Kim, Modes of Demo- cratic Participation, 8
Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique, vIII, no. 4 (December/d6cembre 1975). Printed in Canada/Imprimb au Canada.
553
less in evidence. Thus, on the basis of these findings one is hard pressed to accept the conclusion of Sniderman et al. that party identifications, as an indicator of party loyalty, are as stable and enduring as has been found elsewhere. Rather, they do ex- hibit high rates of change. This does not indicate that loyalty to party does not exist. Both this analysis and that of Sniderman et al. indicate that there is evidence of loyalty to party that is different from a voting preference in a single election. Thus, the tendency to abandon party loyalty as an important variable in the understanding of Canadian voting choice must be avoided. However, as Sniderman et al. point out, analysts of Canadian voting have frequently
pointed to the fickleness of this tie. Con- ventional wisdom, "the textbook theories," point to a penchant for change of party loyalties among Canadian voters. Accord- ing to the analysis here, these theories are quite correct in their descriptions. Cana- dians do alter their party ties more fre- quently and more easily than do voters elsewhere; they do abandon the loyalties of their fathers; and they do search out new parties. Thus, Canadian parties cannot count on stable followings in the electorate for decades. Canadian party strategists must al- ways consider the conditions under which loyalty changes. Political scientists, as well, might profitably address themselves to this question.
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Voted in past two years 72.5 Voted in last national election 70.5 Voted in last provincial election 58.7 Voted in last municipal election 51.9 Take petition around to neighbours 13.7 Go to meeting in government office 7.3 Go to political official about a problem 19.9 Go to neighbourhood meeting 18.8 Talk to friends about a candidate 21.3 Give money in an election campaign 2.9 Attend an election rally 8.2 Work in a political campaign 9.9 Participate in an authorized protest rally or march 5.8 Disobey an unjust law 7.0 Participate in a non-authorized protest rally or march 2.1 N = 854
All variables are of course recall variables as explained in footnote 10.
similar across several democratic polities.5 Four distinct activities have been located in the several nations: (1) voting; (2) active participation in political campaigns; (3) cooperative activity such as joining with others formally or informally to pur- sue political goals; and (4) contacting government officials about some public problem.6 There has been little analysis of the forms of participation of Canadians.7
Thus the purpose of this research note is to examine dimensions of participation in a Canadian sample and compare them to those found by other researchers in other systems. I shall also analyse how
)Ibid., particularly 37-42 61In a further refinement brought about by re-analysis of the us data, Verba and Nie find a strong relationship between contact- ing government officials about social (as opposed to private) problems and coopera- tive activities. They redefined this combi- nation as "communal" acts, acts taken in pursuit of common objectives of groups of people, organized or unorganized. Separate from this was simply contacting a govern- ment official about a personal problem. See Sidney Verba and Norman Nie, Participa- tion in America (New York 1972). 7For recent studies of Canadian political participation see Mark Sproule-Jones and Kenneth Hart, "A Public Choice Model of Political Participation," in this JOURNAL, VI, no. 2 (June 1973), 175-99; Rick Van Loon, "Political Participation in Canada," this JOURNAL, III (1970), 376-99
participation in protest activity clusters with other types of participation examined. Finally, I shall briefly examine some social and political correlates of each type of par- ticipation to note similarities and differ- ences in high and low participators of each kind.
I
The data for this study came from a strati- fied random sample of Toronto families in 13 census tracts. All of the nearly 17,000 households in the tracts were enumerated and screened. From this screening, 560 households were sampled, all of which were intact white families of European or North American descent with at least one child. Where possible, both husband and wife were interviewed. In all, interviews were held with 522 wives and 332 husbands.8
The limitations of inference due to the sampling design need to be noted here. Be-
8For the purpose of another project, the sample was stratified according to the degree of crowding in the households sam- pled. Of the households meeting qualifica- tions expressed above one of every five with less than one person per dwelling unit room was included in the sample, and every household where the number of rooms was less than the number of people was in- cluded. In the following analysis weighting was done so that the two types of families are in proportion to their appearance in the population.
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cause of the regional location, elimination of adults not part of an intact nuclear family, and ethnic restrictions, one cannot generalize from the levels of participation found here to the Canadian population as a whole. However, there is no reason to suspect that the clusters of participatory activities found cannot be used to general- ize to the population.9
Fifteen items measuring recall of par- ticipation in a variety of political acts were used to delineate the participation dimen- sions; 12 were "traditional" kinds of activi- ties analysed by others and 3 were protest activities. A list of these items and the percentage who had participated in each are found in Table I.1o The list includes quite
9The focus of the main project on crowd- ing and its impact was also the reason why non-white, non-European persons were ex- cluded. This was done in order to mini- mize the possible effect of cultural differ- ences on adaptation to crowding. For a similar reason, in order to diminish effects of household composition on adaptation to crowding, only intact families with children were sampled. However, participation levels in this sample are quite close to that re- ported by Van Loon from a nationwide sample: he found about 70 to 75 per cent vote regularly while in our sample 72.5 per cent had voted in the past two years. His data revealed that 20 to 25 per cent of the population are involved in "transi- tional" types of political activity (more active than just voting or talking politics, but less active than running for office, planning a campaign and so on). In our sample from 3 per cent to 21 per cent are engaged in these sorts of activities. See Van Loon, "Political Participation," 378, and Table I of this paper. 10Exact wordings of the items are as fol- lows:
"There are a lot of ways for people to take part in political activities. Some people don't take part at all. Here are a number of things that some people might do. We would like to know if you have done any of these things in the last two years and if you have, how many times. Vote for a political candidate whose ideas you think are good ones? Talk to friends, family or other people you know to try to get them to vote for or against a candidate or issue? Give money to help someone win an elec- tion? Attend rallies, barbeques, meetings or things like that in connection with an election? Work in a political campaign for a candidate whose ideas you think are good ones?"
common activities such as voting, which over 70 per cent of the sample had done, and activities that only a relatively few people had ever done; for example, only 2 per cent had participated in an unauthor- ized protest demonstration. Over-all, 21 per cent of the sample had never participated in any of the activities while 40.4 per cent had voted but done none of the other activi- ties. At the opposite extreme, 7 per cent had engaged in five or more of the activi- ties and about one-third of the sample had engaged in two or more activities exclud- ing voting.
II
DIMENSIONS OF PARTICIPATION
A principal axis factor analysis of the 12 "traditional" kinds of activities revealed three factors corresponding quite closely to
A second set of items: "During the past two years, have you attended any meetings in which tenants' rights, problems with landlords, housing code enforcement, public housing or neighbourhood renewal were discussed?" "Are there conditions in your home that you believe make it an unsafe or hazardous place in which to live?" If yes, "Have you ever talked about these or any kinds of housing problems to a govern- ment official or political leader - such as an alderman, housing officer, someone in City Hall, or a local party or community leader?"
A final set of items were as follows: "There are many ways for people to show agreement or disagreement with what the government is doing. I would like to know which of these means you approve of as ways of showing disagreement with the government and which you disapprove of. I would also like to know if you have ever used any of these methods. Writing letters to elected officials - members of parlia- ment, mayors, etc. or signing a petition; taking a petition around to try to get neigh- bours and people you know to sign it; go- ing to a meeting at a government office to tell what you think about something the government is doing; taking part in protest meetings, rallies or marches which are per- mitted by local authorities; refusing to obey a law that one thinks is unfair; trying to show the government what you think by taking part in nonviolent sit-ins, mass demonstrations and things like that which are not permitted by local authorities." The final three items were classified as "pro- test" the remainder as "traditional" acts.
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three of the four dimensions found in cross- national research.11 The first factor was comprised of the voting items, the second was a campaign activism dimension, and the third a dimension including such items as taking a petition around, going to neigh- bourhood meetings, and talking to political officials about local problems. This dimen- sion combined the distinct cooperative and contacting dimensions found in cross- national research. This combination of con- tacting and cooperative activity, however, is comparable to the "communal" dimen- sion found by Verba and Nie in a refine- ment of their us data.12 However, since in my data this dimension includes seeing a government official about a private prob- lem it is somewhat broader than Verba and Nie's communal dimension. I shall refer to it as communal nonetheless, since most items involve joining with others in pursuit of mutual aims.
Adding the three protest activities to the factor analysis results in the three factors described above remaining quite constant, with the protest activities forming a dis- tinct fourth dimension (See Table II). The four dimensions are strikingly clear with all items loading strongly on one and only one of the four dimensions. The one partial exception is the "disobedience to an un- just law" item. While its highest loading is on the protest dimension, it is substan- tially weaker than the other two protest items.
As Table III indicates, all the traditional forms of participation are positively asso- ciated, while voting and protest have a small negative correlation (-.18). Protest is also only weakly related to communal participation (.18) while all the other partici- pation items are moderately, though not
"An eigenvalue of 1.0 was used as the cut- off for rotation. The factor matrix was sub- jected to an oblique rotation. The loadings of the items comprising the major part of each dimension are found in Table II. 1"See fn. 6 above. It has been suggested that the dimensions as delineated may re- flect a local versus national orientation in participation, rather than a functional ori- entation. This is possible, as the communal activities are most likely (though not in- evitably) locally oriented. However, each of the other dimensions explicitly involve all levels of government, or make no dis- tinction among governmental divisions. Further, if a local-national dimension was being tapped, one would expect municipal voting to load highly with the other local activities, rather than with other forms of voting.
strongly, related to one another (ranging from .28 to .35).
CORRELATES OF PARTICIPATION
Aside from conceptual clarity, of what im- portance is it to know that political par- ticipation comes in a variety of distinct forms? One important reason is that it enables us to see if our stereotypes of what characterizes high and low participants hold across all participatory forms. The findings that political participation is high- est among people of high status, males, persons with high degrees of political ef- ficacy and trust are among the central cor- nerstones of research in political behaviour. However, distinctions about which type of people participate in which type of political activity have usually not been made.
Scores on each participation dimension were computed for each individual in the survey and these scores were used as indices of participation. These indices were cor- related with a number of social and atti- tudinal characteristics (see Table Iv).13
13Four attitudes about government were examined: trust in government, the belief that government is responsive, the belief that the respondent himself or herself could influence the government, and the belief that violence is useful or necessary to bring about change. These particular dimensions were delineated through a fac- tor analysis of 13 attitudinal items. The components of each scale were: (1) indi- vidual influence - "It seems to me that whoever you vote for things go pretty much the same"; "Nothing I ever do seems to have any effect upon what happens in poli- tics"; No matter what people think; a few people will always run things anyway"; (2) governmental responsiveness - "The federal government is pretty much run for the good of all people instead of for a few big groups looking out for themselves"; "An ordinary person doesn't have the chance he deserves in the law courts"; "I feel that my political leaders hardly care what people like me think or want"; (3) Trust in government - "Most politicians can be trusted to do what they think is best for the country"; "If I complained to a city agency they would fix up whatever was wrong"; (4) belief that cruelty or violence is necessary - "There are times when it al- most seems better for people to take the law into their own hands rather than to wait for the government to do something"; "We might as well make up our minds that in order to make the world free, a lot of innocent people will have to suffer"; "To bring about changes for the good of man- kind often requires cruelty."
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DIMENSIONS OF PARTICIPATION (factor pattern matrix*)
Communal Voting activities Campaigning Protest
Times voted -. 89(- .89)" .00 - .03 .05 Voted in last national election - .93(- .93) - .08 - .08 .02 Voted in last prov. election -. 75(- .74) .07 .04 .01 Voted in last municipal election -. 61(-. 59) .11 .10 .03 Take petition around .08 - .39(.40) - .06 .07 Go to meeting in government
office .03 -.46(.48) .11 .19 Go to political official with
problem .04 - .34(.36) - .16 .04 Go to neighbourhood meeting .01 -.71(.69) .00 -.12 Talk to friends about a candidate -. 21 -. 12 .55(.62) -. 16 Give money in an election
campaign .03 .09 .42(.38) .13 Attend election rallies - .00 .07 .48(.57) - .22 Work in a political campaign -.01 -.04 .66(.65) - .01 Participate in an authorized
protest rally or march - .01 - .23 - .07 .55 Disobey an unjust law - .00 .02 .03 .26 Participate in a non-authorized
protest rally or march - .02 - .07 - .14 .50 Eigenvalue (and explained
variance) after rotation 3.51(57.9%) 1.36(22.5%) .71(11.8%) .48(7.9%)
*Factor loadings are the result of a principal axis factor analysis with an oblique rotation. The four factors accounted for 56% of the variance before rotation. Due to listwise deletion of variables, the N for this and the following tables is 817. tLoadings in parenthesis are the variable loadings in the factor pattern solution when protest variables are omitted.
*Significant at .001. tAll correlations are Pearson's r.
Among the social correlates of participa- tion, we find that the sex of the respondent affected only participation in protest and campaign activities, where men partici- pated slightly more than women. No sex differences were noted in voting or com- munal activities. The age of the respondent increased his likelihood of voting and en- gaging in communal activities, but not in campaigning or protest acts. Education is moderately related to voting and campaign- ing, but its relationship to the other activi- ties is slight. Occupational status affects voting, while its relationship with the other
three variables is quite modest. Ethnicity is associated only with voting behaviour. Those who identify themselves as Cana- dian are more likely to vote than those who identify with one of the Southern Euro- pean ethnic groups, most of whom have not yet become citizens. No differences at all appear between those who identify themselves as English Canadian and French Canadian. Finally, citizenship itself affects voting, as one might expect, but has little impact on the other forms of political par- ticipation, which is somewhat unexpected.
Turning from social to attitudinal cor-
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Attitudinal characteristics Belief in government's responsiveness .11** .00 - .08** - .03 Belief that individual can affect government .21* .21* .16* .13* Trust in government .09** .04 - .08** -.05 Belief political violence useful - .01 - .03 .09** .10**
*Significant at about .001. **Significant at about .05. tAll correlations are Pearson's r. ttCoding as follows: Sex: 1 = female; 2 = male Age: actual age in years. Education: number of years of education. Ethnicity 5 dummy variables based on the individual's self-identification. The percentage of each self-identified group is as follows: French Canadian 4.3%, English Canadian 5.6%, Portuguese 6.4%, Spanish, Italian, or Greek 6.6%, Canadian 64.0%. The others included a sprinkling of Germans and Ukrainians and about 7% who will not identify with any group.
Occupation: 4 categories (1) unskilled blue collar, (2) skilled blue collar, (3) low status white collar, (4) managers and professionals
Citizenship: 1 = Canadian citizens, 0 = not Canadian citizen.
relates of participation, belief in govern- mental responsiveness and trust in govern- ment are slightly related to propensity to vote, but slightly negatively related to com- munal activities and not related at all to the other two participatory forms. The be- lief that an individual can affect the gov- ernment is positively related to all forms of participation, though it is more strongly related to voting and campaigning rather than the other two forms. Finally, the be- lief that political violence is useful or necessary is modestly related to both pro- test and communal forms of participation but unrelated to the other two.
In general, the rather low absolute value of almost all the correlates of participation should be noted. None of these widely used demographic or attitudinal measures is a good predictor of political participa- tion, although certainly some modest rela-
tionships are apparent. These low associa- tions are not at all peculiar to this Cana- dian sample. For example, Nie and his associates found the correlation between participation and social status to range from .18 to .43 in five nations, with the median value .28.14 Perhaps the stereo- types of strong association between partici- pation and a variety of demographic char- acteristics, particularly class-related vari- ables, stems from early voting studies which used cross-tabulations to show the effect of demographic conditions on par- ticipation. Small relationships between variables, which might result in a very small correlation, usually seem more sub- stantial when presented in cross-tabular form.
14"Social Structure and Political Participa- tion," 364
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It has been shown that dimensions of po- litical participation in this Canadian sample are quite similar to those that have been found by some recent studies in other na- tional settings. Rather than being unidi- mensional, participation is comprised of distinct dimensions including voting, cam- paigning, communal activities, and protest activities. However, the communal dimen- sion is slightly broader than the one found by Verba and Nie in their American sam- ple. The fact that one communal dimension, rather than distinct cooperative and con- tacting dimensions, emerges also distin- guishes this Canadian group from the other national groups analysed by Verba, Nie, and Kim. Except for protest activities, the forms of participation are positively asso- ciated with one another but only in a mod- erate way.
Further, each of the participation dimen- sions is associated with somewhat different attitudinal and social correlates. Citizen- ship is most highly related to voting, while political efficacy is the largest correlate of
campaign activism. Communal forms of participation are associated with age and efficacy, while efficacy, the belief in the usefulness of political violence, and educa- tion are the largest correlates of protest activity. Clearly there are similarities in the correlates of the four activities, but differences also emerge. Education, occupa- tion, and efficacy are not as strongly related to protest activities, for example, as they are to voting, while sex and the belief that political violence is useful are more related. In general, the traditional predictors of par- ticipation are more highly associated with voting than with any of the other forms of participation, though the absolute correla- tions are not large in any case.
In sum, this note has empirically deline- ated some distinctions in types of political participation. The dimensions that emerged are similar to but not identical with those found in other democratic polities. It is hoped that recognition of the multidimen- sionality of participation will be a first step towards a better understanding of the ante- cedents and effects of political participation.
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