Beyond SES: A Resource Model of Political Participation

TLDR

Political participation depends on time, money, and civic skills that are acquired early and further developed in adult institutions, and these resources are unevenly distributed across socioeconomic groups, producing distinct stratification patterns for different political acts. The study develops a resource model of political participation and disaggregates overall activity into time, money, and voting acts. The model treats time, money, and civic skills—communication and organizational capacities—as the key resources driving political activity. Two‑stage least squares analysis shows that these resources strongly predict overall political activity, explaining the traditional predictive power of socioeconomic status.

Abstract

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.