The Motivational Structure of Political Participation

IN The People's Choice,' Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet found that the psychological involvement of the individual in a political campaign had important effects upon his behavior. They termed this psychological involvement interest in the election, in the sense of having one's interests involved, and they found that interest was one of the primary factors influencing political behavior. They found, for example, that interest influenced the time of final vote decision, that it differentiated constants (people who made up their minds and kept them made up) from one-party changers and one-party changers from two-party changers, that it influenced degree of exposure to political propaganda, and that it determined who would vote and who would not. In fact, interest functioned in so many ways that it had constantly to be taken into account throughout the Erie County study. This paper continues the study of political involvement reported in The People's Choice. It shows that interest is not a uni-dimensional characteristic of individuals, but rather a three-dimensional one; there is not one interest-in-the-election, but rather three interrelated ones. It provides a verified hypothesis as to the motivational nature of the three dimensions of political involvement, and relates these motivations to some of the findings of The People's Choice. Finally, it illustrates a novel application of traditional factorial techniques, viz., the use of factor analysis in testing a previously stated hypothesis as to the factorial composition of a correlation matrix

Epistemology · Political science · Politics · Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence · Philosophy · Psychology · Social and Intergroup Psychology · Social Psychology

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