Although many have hypothesized that neighborhoods and social context are important influences on the decision to vote, the data to study these phenomenon have often been inadequate. We examine a unique source of data, registered voter lists, from a rich variety of locations that allow us to tap into this social participation dynamic using a multilevel research design. We find that neighborhood context does have a socializing influence on voters, sometimes mobilizing them while at other times demobilizing them. Notably, this effect is separate from the effect of individual-level sociodemographic influences on participation and is manifest over and above these longstanding explanations.of social context, social capital, and their relation to political participation (e.g.,

In this paper, I reexamine the impact of electoral institutions on legislative party organization. A long-running theme in comparative politics is that Brazil's political party system is weakened by the structure of its electoral institutions. I revisit this research by comparing legislative parties in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies with those in the Brazilian Senate. This comparison allows me to control for political history, constituents, and even the legislative agenda, while providing variance on the key explanatory variable-the electoral system. The Senate is very similar to the Chamber of Deputies, but does not use the much maligned open-list proportional representation (OLPR) rules. The result is a powerful opportunity for testing and inference. The comparisons reveal no consistent or significant differences between institutions.

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This is an analysis of the spatial structure of political participation in the United States using spatial econometric techniques and newly available geo-coded data. The results provide strong evidence that political participation is geographically clustered, and that this clustering cannot be explained entirely by social network involvement, individual-level characteristics, such as race, income, education, cognitive forms of political engagement, or by aggregate-level factors such as racial diversity, income inequality, mobilization or mean education level. The analysis suggests that the spatial structure of participation is consistent with a diffusion process that occurs independently from citizens' involvement in social networks.