The Modes of Participation Revisited, 1980-2004

In a series of publications, Verba and Nie and their coauthors argued that participatory acts vary along a number of dimensions, and that acts having similar dimensional profiles would constitute distinct modes of participation (Verba and Nie 1972; Verba, Nie, and Kim 1971, 1978; Verba, et al., 1973). In the realm of electoral participation, these investigators postulated two modes, voting and campaigning. Campaigning was thought to encompass a variety of behaviors, including working for a candidate or party, trying to persuade someone how to vote, and making a campaign contribution. A new dimensional typology, presented here, predicts that working in a campaign and contributing to political actors constitute separate modes of participation. We confirm these predictions by performing confirmatory factor analyses of participation items from the 1980-2004 American National Election Studies. We also find that vote persuasion is best modeled as a measure of political discussion.