Abstract
This study examines sources of variation in political participation and cognition, testing the effects of several factors on individuals' engagement in the local political process including, as dependent variables, local political involvement, local issue awareness, and attitude strength. Our study highlights the importance of discussion networks and mass media for local political involvement, issue awareness, and attitude strength. In other words, the idea—vocalized by many political scientists—that demographic variables and ideological differences explain most of the variance in people's involvement in politics and attitudes was not supported by our data. Ties to the community, social networks, and other communication variables also played a key role. Both the direction and the extremity of ideological beliefs were related to the strength with which respondents held their attitudes on a local issue. Even when these more stable predictors were controlled for, we again found strong influences of heterogeneous discussion networks, local newspaper use, and local political involvement.
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