Protest and Presidential Voting: Biographical Precipitants of political Participation over the Life Course, 1965-1997
Open Access
- Author:
- Tripp, Winston B
- Graduate Program:
- Sociology
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- June 07, 2013
- Committee Members:
- John David Mccarthy, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Glenn A Firebaugh, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Roger Kent Finke, Committee Member
Eric Plutzer, Committee Member - Keywords:
- Protest
Voting
Political Participation
Youth-Parent Socialization Survey
Biographical Availability - Abstract:
- Some scholars have argued that one of the factors that facilitate political participation is increased biographical availability. Although this concept has gained widespread acceptance, it has received limited empirical scrutiny and only a handful of researchers have investigated the relationship between time, biographical availability, and political participation. I contribute to the extant research by examining changes in the effect of biographical availability over the life course, asking not only if, but also when biographical availability matters to two disparate forms of political participation: protesting and presidential voting. The primary data for this research come from the Youth-Parent Socialization Survey (1965-1997), a nationally representative random sample of 1,669 high school seniors from 97 schools in 1965, and again in 1973, 1982 and 1997. The data includes systematic retrospective reports of individual protest participation and presidential voting, as well as retrospective demographic information on individual life events that tap dimensions of biographical availability. This data set provides a unique opportunity to evaluate the effects of biographical availability at different points in the respondent’s lives and to examine the effect of biographical availability on particular trajectories of people, ranging from those who participate all throughout life to those who only begin participating later in life. I find mixed support for the biographical availability hypothesis. Being a college student facilitates both protesting and voting, but much more early in life than later. Being not married affects protesting but not voting. Additionally, I find that people follow different trajectories in the lifecourse in terms of how they choose to protest and vote, and that, while biographical availability has an attenuated effect on those who protested when young and continued protesting, it does not have an effect on those who start protesting later in life. Other biographical factors such as, such as union membership and church affiliation, play more of a role in precipitating protest participation for these “late bloomers”. These findings indicate that although biographical availability does have a clear effect on protesting and presidential voting, the effect diminishes over time and only matters to some.