Sense of community and political participation

Current conceptualizations of sense of community suggest that this quality may be correlated with various forms of political participation. This notion was tested in the current study by measuring and computing relationships between sense of community and five different types of political participation: voting, campaigning, contacting political officials, working on public problems, and talking about politics. Indices of these political activities were further subdivided into those with local relevance and those with nonlocal relevance. Self-report measures of sense of community and political participation were administered by telephone interview to 546 randomly selected respondents in Birmingham, Alabama. Results showed that sense of community was significantly related to voting, to contacting officials, to working on public problems, to local and nonlocal participation, and to an index of overall political participation. The findings are discussed.