Measuring Political Participation

As an area which lends itself to empirical analysis, political participation has been subject to rigorous attempts at operationalization. In this article, an extension of these efforts is intended. Employing data collected in Kenya, Korea, and Turkey, a ten-item, three-dimensional scale of political participation is developed. The overall structure of the scale closely resembles the findings of Verba, Nie, and Kim—a fact which also lends support to the validity of the scale of political participation developed here. Easy to administer, valid, and reliable, the three-dimensional, ten-item scale provides a potential for cumulative analysis in the subfield of political participation.