Community Political Development and the Cultivation of Engagement

• In Event: Where We Live: How Neighborhoods Shape Civic Engagement

Abstract

In response to an increasingly diverse polity, the institutional dimension of local governance has become an essential sphere of minority political incorporation. Central to this sphere of politics are community organizations. Although commonly recognized for their provision of various public services, the potential influence of community organizations reaches beyond their services as today the provide historically marginalized groups with opportunities to be involved in and thus shape politics and policy at the local level. Still, much is unknown about the underlying mechanisms that bind the political experiences of minority groups with the community institutions in their surroundings. We address this by proposing a meso-level analysis of political development in which we explore the relationship between individuals, community organizations, and feelings of political efficacy.
We rely on data from the 2018 Bay Area Politics Survey, which provides a focus on the political development of a regionally specific community, with oversamples of Black, Asian, and Latino residents. In our analysis we differentiate between internal, external, and a combined efficacy scale. Because of the interactive nature of community institutions, we examine both the contributions individuals make to their local organizations, in addition to the benefits individuals report receiving from them. Such analysis is based on the premise that institutions, such as schools, churches, and local government, help shape community ethos and provide templates not only for individual behaviors, but also patterns of community engagement. We will address these complex theoretical and empirical questions in a larger work that begins with the present paper. Our empirical strategy provides preliminary evidence of a unified theory of community political development that accounts for a variety of forms of localized community and political engagement that has implications for more traditional forms of political participation.

Authors

• Ivy A.M. Cargile, California State University, Bakersfield

• Marcela García-Castañon, San Francisco State University

• Kiku Huckle, Pace University

• Angel Luis Molina, Arizona State University