Despite the legal norm of universal adult citizenship in the United States, and thus the legitimacy of participation by all strata of society, the actual level of political involvement in local communities is not high and differs greatly from group to group. Our task here is to spell out some of the conditions of group membership which contribute to local political involvement. Our broader purpose is to argue the need to re-expand the theoretical framework for analysis of political participation and thus to correct the present imbalanced focus upon participation as an individual act.Thus we shall examine some structural, rather than psychological, conditions of local political involvement. In this we shall occasionally use some measures previously reported in other studies and conventionally regarded as tapping psychological attributes of individuals; but these we shall regard as defining sets of role-expectations or as locating categories of persons placed within a certain range of normative obligations; and, more importantly, we shall systematically compare the net effect (upon local political involvement) of such variables with that of the more conventionally defined structural variables.
Concern over representative response and its attendant problems has deterred many social scientists from using the mailed questionnaire as a survey instrument. The purpose here is to add another title to the bibliography enumerating unique or effective techniques for achieving high response rates to mail questionnaires. 1 In the same number, Stanley C. Plog discusses a way of using the daily newspaper to develop a literacy index for mass communications research: "Explanations for a High Return Rate on a Mail Questionnaire," pp. 297-298. James N. Rosenau, expressing a "first-time fascination" with questionnaire mailers, analyzes the relevance of an idiosyncratic variable In "Meticulousness as a Factor in the Response illustration of novel techniques used to question Army officers by mail appears in Don Cahalan, "Effectiveness of a Mail Questionnaire Technique in the Army," Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 15, 1951, pp. 575-580. It is an example of mailed questionnaire effectiveness where strong lines of institutional control and traditions of responsibility classify the potential respondents. In the same number, a turkey becomes the unique prize, used as an incentive to achieve responses from unemployed railroad firemen, in a mailed questionnaire: John B. Knox, "Maximizing Responses to Mail Questionnaires: A New Technique," pp. 366-367.
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