People decide about political parties by taking into account the preferences, values, expectations, and perceptions of their family, friends, colleagues, and neighbours. As most people live with others, members of their households influence each other's political decisions. How and what they think about politics and what they do are the outcomes of social processes. Applying varied statistical models to data from extensive German and British household surveys, this book shows that wives and husbands influence each other; young adults influence their parents, especially their mothers. Wives and mothers sit at the centre of households: their partisanship influences the partisanship of everyone else, and the others affect them. Politics in households interacts with competition among the political parties to sustain bounded partisanship. People ignore one of the major parties and vary their preference of its major rival over time. Election campaigns reinforce these choices.
Abraham Kaplan in his ‘paradox of conceptualization’ draws attention to the fundamental problem of concept-formation: ‘The proper concepts are needed to formulate good theory, but we need a good theory to arrive at the proper concepts’. On this view, concepts are neither right nor wrong but are more or less useful; their utility is determined by the twin and mutually dependent requirements of empirical precision and theoretical importance. ‘Empirical precision’ has to do with a concept's ability to ‘carve up’ the world of phenomena without unnecessary ambiguities; ‘theoretical importance’ has to do with the utility of a concept in the development of statements of wide explanatory and predictive power.
This article examines a mode of political participation that frequently has been overlookedindividual efforts to obtain assistance from government officials. Using the seven-nation data set of Verba, Nie, and Kim, we develop and empirically evaluate alternatiave models of citizen contacting. Our first model draws on variations in the distribution of social and economic resources to explain the likelihood of contacting. The second focuses on differences in political ties to locate those most likely to contact government officials. We find greater support for the political ties model. Persons active in political parties and election campaigns are the most likely to engage in citizen contacting. Without political ties, few poor or uneducated persons would ask officials for assistance. We conclude by noting the more general theoretical and normative implications of our study.
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