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Beyond Membership: A Sense of Community and Political Behavior

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Abstract

Why does community matter for political participation? In this paper, I consider how community psychology, particularly “sense of community” can be used to address questions of political behavior. Individuals’ perceptions about their significance in a given community can have meaningful effects on the way in which communities influence politics. Using a unique survey instrument designed to capture individual’s perceptions of community connectedness and political behavior across five contexts (workplace, church, associations, neighborhood, and circle of friends (i.e., an informal network) I analyze data from 822 respondents and examine how sense of community influences two types of political behavior: voting in local elections and political discussion. The empirical analyses presented demonstrate that sense of community contributes to explaining voting and discussion, even after controlling for demographic, personality, and other political factors.

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Notes

  1. The author recognizes that an alternative approach could have employed the use of an instrumental variable, but such a strategy is risky because of the difficulty inherent in devising persuasive instruments.

  2. The Big Five personality traits are openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, emotional stability, and agreeableness. These are included mainly as control variables to account for personality affects that may be related to various types of political behaviors. It is entirely plausible, even likely that personality plays a large role in many types of political behaviors and attitudes. For a detailed discussion of personality and political behavior see Mondak and Halperin (2008).

  3. In terms of the area’s demographic characteristics, the survey site has a population of 284,539, 77% reside in urban communities (U.S. Census Bureau 2000). The per capita income is $19,990. Roughly 48% of the population is male and the median age is 30.

  4. A computer randomly generated 11,000 telephone numbers and interviewers called 8,309 of the numbers. Of those contacted, there were 1398 eligible respondents. A total of 822 interviews were completed for a response rate of 58% (completed interviews/eligible respondents).

  5. See Table 1 for the sense of community scale. There exist other measures of sense of community in the literature however, the Chavis SCI is the most used and broadly validated measure of SOC (Chipuer and Pretty 1999).

  6. For a full review of uses of the sense of community index see Chipuer and Pretty (1999).

  7. The SCI used in this survey was adapted and contains 11 items, correlational tests conducted on a pilot study reveals that the 11 item battery is highly correlated with the 12 item battery at .989. Because I am interested in the overall sense of community score rather than the separate dimensions outlined by Chavis et al. (1986). I believe the adaptation suits the purpose here very well.

  8. Note that all of the respondents answered the sense of community questions about circle of friends and neighborhood but many opted out of the questions that dealt with associations, church, and work. This was certainly expected to occur. It makes complete sense that most people have friends and live in a neighborhood but they may not work, attend a church, or belong to an association.

  9. Difference of means tests was conducted for each pair of contexts. The means between all the contexts are statistically significant except in the following instances: church and association; neighborhood and association; and work and association.

  10. Reliability analyses were conducted on all five subscales, the alpha was .70, suggesting that the individual subscales can be combined reliably to form an additive index. Each subscale also underwent reliability analysis to confirm that the 11 items could be combined to form an individual context scale. The reliability analysis for each subscale is as follows: church context a = .80; neighborhood context a = .82; organization context a = .78; friendship context a = .81; work context a = .84.

  11. The independent variables used in these analyses are not highly correlated, please refer to the correlation matrix in Table 10, most fall between .02 and .20, and in only 6 cases does it exceed .40 (but fall below .45).

  12. The personality traits modeled here are included as control variables. Recent research is beginning to pay attention to the effect of personality on political behavior, finding for example, that personality can be linked to all types of political behavior and attitudes including partisanship, ideology, presidential approval, efficacy, trust, and voting to name a few (Mondak and Halperin 2008).

  13. For a discussion of the utility of the Big Five Model in psychological research studies see Digman 1990, 1996; Goldberg 1990; and John and Srivastava 1999.

  14. The Big Five model does not claim to capture all dimensions of personality, (that would require an exhaustive list of survey items) rather its proponents argue that it captures the most important differences in personality. Indeed scholars are continuing to research other aspects of personality that The Big Five Model ignores.

  15. Question wording for this item was follows: “We’d like to know about discussions that you have about local politics. How often do you discuss issues affecting Tallahassee/Leon County with others?”.

  16. Except that it does not include home ownership or income. Past research in the area of political discussion does not include these types of variables and in keeping with that tradition, they are not included here.

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Acknowledgments

This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. SES-0417813 and grants by the Leroy Collins Center for Public Policy Research at Florida State University, and the DeVoe L. Moore Center for the Study of Critical Issues in Economic Policy and Government at Florida State University. I am grateful for the help and support of Jeff Mondak, Tom Carsey, Charles Barrilleaux, Carol Weissert, and Christopher Lewis. I also wish to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments.

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  1. Department of Government and World Affairs, University of Tampa, 401 W. Kennedy Blvd, Tampa, FL, 33606-1490, USA

    Mary R. Anderson

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Correspondence to Mary R. Anderson.

Appendix

Appendix

See appendix Tables 8, 9, and 10

Table 8 Descriptive statistics
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Table 9 Summary description of variables and measures
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Table 10 Correlation matrix of independent variables
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Anderson, M.R. Beyond Membership: A Sense of Community and Political Behavior. Polit Behav 31, 603–627 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-009-9089-x

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