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Political Periods and Political Participation*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Paul Allen Beck  and
M. Kent Jennings
Paul Allen Beck
Affiliation:
Florida State University
M. Kent Jennings
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
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Abstract

Analysis of complementary data sets, a 1965–1973 panel study of young adults and their parents and the 1956–1976 Michigan presidential election series, shows that the late 1960s and early 1970s were a deviant period where participation in American politics was concerned. During this time, the young were more active politically than their elders, substantially increasing their participation from previous years, and Americans on the ideological left participated more than those at other positions along the ideological continuum. While this surge of left-wing activism was not restricted to the young, it probably accounts for the relative participation advantage enjoyed by the young. These findings challenge the “conventional wisdom” about patterns of participation in America. They are best explained by recognizing that the opportunities for political action among the American citizenry are not fixed, but instead vary with changes in the political stimuli across different periods.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 73 , Issue 3 , September 1979 , pp. 737 - 750
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1979

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Footnotes

*

We are grateful to Felix Boni, Paul Lopatto, and Bill McGee for their assistance in the analysis; to William J. Keefe, Warren E. Miller, Richard Niemi, Bert Rockman, and several anonymous referees for their constructive comments on earlier versions of this article; and to the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research and Richard Hoster for making available the data used in the analysis. Funding for the collection and processing of the parent-youth data came from the National Science Foundation and the Ford Foundation. The second author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and the Guggenheim Foundation.

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