The Impact of Cross-Cutting Cleavages on Citizens Political Involvement: Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association

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Abstract (may include machine translation)

The paper revisits some old propositions of pluralist theories and the Columbia school about the impact of “cross-pressure” on political attitudes and behavior that, following some discouraging test results, largely vanished from scholarly works since the early seventies. Cross-pressure means that some individuals, like socially conservative trade union members in the United States, are pulled in opposite partisan directions because of their different characteristics. In their most generalized form the relevant hypothesis suggests that the more conflicting are the ways the various attributes of citizens pull them towards one party or another, the more disengaged they become, reducing cognitive and affective involvement with politics as well as participation. The paper scrutinizes the micro-logic of the proposition, points out that cross-pressure on citizens may be one of the mechanisms underlying the freezing effect of cleavages postulated by Lipset and Rokkan (1967), develops a greatly improved measure of cross-pressure, and subjects the hypothesis to a far more comprehensive test than those attempted before. The empirical analysis finds some support for the hypothesis using worldwide cross-sectional data on various forms of political participation from the World Values Study.
Original languageEnglish
Number of pages50
StatePublished - 2003
EventAnnual Meeting of the American Political Science Association - Philadelphia, Philadelphia, United States
Duration: 27 Aug 200331 Aug 2003

Conference

ConferenceAnnual Meeting of the American Political Science Association
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityPhiladelphia
Period27/08/0331/08/03

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