"Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of political competence and the political field have not been used widely in studies of political life in the United States. But these concepts offer a more theoretically grounded and coherent way of understanding how people in this country do and do not engage with politics than most conventional approaches to political participation. I argue that Bourdieu’s notion of “political competence” (1979:126; 1984:405-6) allows us a much more full understanding of the ways that disenfranchised people relate to the political process. I use analyses of the full (1978 – 2004) General Social Survey to do three things: first, to challenge commonly accepted renditions of the causes of the “don’t know” response to political questions; second, to explore the relationship between “don’t know” response and income and education; and finally to argue that don’t know response is indicative of low “political competence” – not simply a lack of resources or knowledge. I find that education and income are significant and important in predicting no response levels for political questions of various types but are insignificant and/or unimportant for other types of questions; and that political question response levels are substantively and significantly associated with the probability of voting in a presidential election." Source: Center for the Study of Democracy. Symposium, U.C. Irvine.
Download PDF Report | Link to eScholarship Repository
No comments:
Post a Comment