Political Participation and Neighborhood Social Context Revisited

This research note reports the results of an extension of Huckfeldt's study of the effects of neighborhood status on political participation. Using survey responses from the 1972 American Election Study, Huckfeldt's distinction between individually and socially based participation (1979), and composite measures of respondent and neighborhood social status, we find: (1) that neighborhood social status is related to socially based participation; but (2) that it is unrelated to individually based participatory acts; and (3) that the effect of neighborhood social status on participation is not consistent for respondents of different levels of social status.