This article documents the prevalence in organized interest politics in the United States of organizations—for example, corporations, think tanks, universities, or hospitals—that have no members in the ordinary sense and analyzes the consequences of that dominance for the democratic representation of citizen interests. We use data from the Washington Representatives Study, a longitudinal data base containing more than 33,000 organizations active in national politics in 1981, 1991, 2001, 2006, and 2011. The share of membership associations active in Washington has eroded over time until, in 2011, barely a quarter of the more than 14,000 organizations active in Washington in 2011 were membership associations, and less than half of those were membership association with individuals as members. In contrast, a majority of the politically involved organizations were memberless organizations, of which nearly two-thirds were corporations. The dominance of memberless organizations in pressure politics raises important questions about democratic representation. Studies of political representation by interest groups raise several concerns about democratic inequalities: the extent to which representation of interests by groups is unequal, the extent to which groups fail to represent their members equally, and the extent to which group members are unable to control their leaders. All of the dilemmas that arise when membership associations advocate in politics become even more intractable when organizations do not have members.

In a careful paper, John R. Hibbing makes a strong case that political scientists—who have learned lessons from many other disciplines—need to make room for biology. While his paper is reassuring on many counts, two matters cause concern. First, Hibbing argues that the open acknowledgment of the biological basis of group differences would lead to greater tolerance. It is easy to adduce examples to suggest that it is unrealistic to expect that people, especially people with political concerns and objectives, will begin to focus on the diversity within groups rather than the differences between groups. Second, it is not clear the extent to which investigations into the biological basis of politics would illumine the great questions of political analysis.

What is the impact of the possibility of political participation on the Internet on long-standing patterns of participatory inequality in American politics? An August 2008 representative survey of Americans conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project provides little evidence that there has been any change in the extent to which political participation is stratified by socio-economic status, but it suggests that the web has ameliorated the well-known participatory deficit among those who have just joined the electorate. Even when only that subset of the population with Internet access is considered, participatory acts such as contributing to candidates, contacting officials, signing a political petition, or communicating with political groups are as stratified socio-economically when done on the web as when done offline. The story is different for stratification by age where historically younger people have been less engaged than older people in most forms of political participation. Young adults are much more likely than their elders to be comfortable with electronic technologies and to use the Internet, but among Internet users, the young are not especially politically active. How these trends play out in the future depends on what happens to the current Web-savvy younger generation and the cohorts that follow and on the rapidly developing political capacities of the Web. Stay logged on …

Political participation has long been a puzzle for political science analysis. The logic of collective action suggests that activity to achieve collective goals is irrational; yet citizens are active. In this article, we approach the subject from the point of view of political activists, using survey data to consider their own interpretations of why they took part. The data show that participants recall many gratifications from their activity and that the patterns differ substantially across modes of participation. These rewards tend to be ‘political’ in that activists cite both civic gratifications and the desire to achieve collective goals more frequently than would be expected on the basis of rational choice approaches. The variations among acts with respect to the nature of the retrospective interpretations of the rewards they provide – in conjunction with open-ended responses about the issues behind activity – lend credence to respondents' accounts. The results call into question the applicability of narrow rational choice approaches to political activity.

This article uses data from the Citizen Participation Study – a large-scale survey of the voluntary activity of the American public designed to oversample African-Americans and Latinos as well as political activists – to inquire about the extent and sources of differences in levels of political activity among African-Americans, Latinos and Anglo-Whites. Considering a variety of political acts, we find that, in the aggregate, African-Americans are slightly, and Latinos are substantially, less active than Anglo-Whites. However, the resources that facilitate participation – some of which, for example, education, are related to social class and others of which, for example, religious preference and activity are associated with race or ethnicity – are distributed very unevenly across the three groups, with Latinos at a particular disadvantage. After accounting for differences in politically relevant resources, there is no significant difference among the three groups in political participation.

Gender and Social Capital. Edited by Brenda O'Neill and Elisabeth O'Neill Gidengil. New York and London: Routledge. 2006. 425 pp. $90.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.

The essays in this volume constitute a feminist response to Robert Putnam's influential book Bowling Alone, and they shed light on two interrelated questions: First, how is our understanding of the nature and impact of social capital enriched by the introduction of a concern with the consequences of gender differences? Second, how is our understanding of the relationship of gender to politics deepened by an ongoing concern with social capital? As Virginia Sapiro put it (p. 152) in her exceptionally clear theoretical essay: “Wherever discussions of social capital and politics lead, our understanding of the phenomenon will be severely limited if scholars neglect the roles of gender in the creation and distribution of social capital and in the links between social capital and politics. Important aspects of the historically different cultural constructions of male and female in society and politics suggest that disregarding gender in understanding social capital is unwise. Given how different are the structures of women's and men's day-to-day lives and the different types and amounts of financial and social resources to which they have access, a ‘gender-neutral’ story of social capital and politics is likely to be a faulty story.”

In the assembled critiques, the report of the APSA Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy is labeled simultaneously “dangerous quackery” and a “timid document.” Are we all reading the same report? At least when it comes to Stephen Earl Bennett's commentary (2006), probably not.

A survey of the American public is used to model citizen political recruitment as a two-stage process. First, those who recruit others to become active in politics seek likely activists through “rational prospecting.” Second, they seek acquiescence to their requests. We model each part of the process, delineating the characteristics of individuals that make them attractive prospects and that make them likely to say “yes.” Recruiters who have information about, and leverage over, their targets are more likely to be successful. In seeking out people who would be likely not only to participate but also to participate effectively, rational prospectors select people with characteristics that are already overrepresented among participants. The net result of the recruitment process for political activity in general—and for financial contributions, in particular—is to exacerbate participatory stratification.

This paper proposes a multistage, interactive model that takes into account selection processes into nonpolitical institutions, processes by which participatory factors are allocated within institutions, and the forward linkage to political activity to explain the small but persistent gender gap in political participation. Using OLS regression and simulation to analyze a large-scale survey containing detailed measures of both workplace experiences and political participation, we find that women are less likely than men to accumulate participatory factors on the job because they are less likely to be in the workforce at all, to be in the workforce full-time, or to be in high-level jobs. The net effect of these processes is that a substantial fraction of the gender gap in political activity can be explained by gender differences in workplace experiences.

This paper demonstrates that women are less politically interested, informed, and efficacious than men and that this gender gap in political engagement has consequences for political participation. Only when gender differences in political interest, information, and efficacy are considered along with gender differences in resources can we explain the relatively small disparity between the sexes with respect to political activity. When we searched for the origins of the gender gap in political engagement, we found that it can be explained only partially by gender differences in factors such as education that are associated with political engagement. Furthermore, these gender differences in political orientation seem to be specific to politics—rather than the manifestation of general personal attributes. Investigation of the extent to which the cues received by males and females that politics is a man's world are responsible for the gender gap in political engagement yielded results that were suggestive, but mixed.

This study uses regression analysis of data from a telephone survey of 380 married couples to subject to rare empirical test the contention that, because women are unequal at home, they cannot be equal in the polity. The argument is often made that wives' disadvantage in comparison to their husbands with respect to control over family income, availability of free time, power over decisions, or mutual respect dampens their ability to participate fully in politics. In fact, domestic inequalities do have implications for political activity, but these effects differ from what is usually posited by being stronger for husbands than for wives. For husbands, control over major financial decisions and autonomy in using small amounts of time enhance their ability to participate in politics beyond what would be expected on the basis of their other characteristics. In short, being boss at home is politically empowering to husbands.

This paper develops a resource model of political participation. The resources considered are time, money, and civic skills—those communications and organizational capacities that are essential to political activity. These skills are not only acquired early in life but developed in the nonpolitical institutional settings of adult life: the workplace, organizations, and churches and synagogues. These resources are distributed differentially among groups defined by socioeconomic status. A two-stage least squares analysis shows these resources have powerful effects on overall political activity, thus explaining why socioeconomic status has traditionally been so powerful in predicting participation. We disaggregate overall activity into three kinds of acts: those that involve giving time, those that entail donating money, and voting. Each requires a different configuration of resources resulting in different patterns of stratification across various political acts.

In this investigation of the voluntary participation of men and women, we find that even when the definition of activity is broadened beyond the electoral forms of activity usually considered, men are a bit more active in politics than women. However, the pattern across activities does not conform to the expectations generated by the literature. In comparison with men, women are disadvantaged when it comes to the resources that facilitate political activity. When these resource deficits are viewed in the context of the paths to participation taken by men and women, it turns out that if women were as well endowed with political resources as men, their overall levels of political activity would be closer to men's and their financial contributions would be considerably closer to men's.