Citizen Participation in America

长期以来，学者们一直对谁参与和不参与自愿的社会和政治活动感兴趣，这些活动是美国人生活的基本组成部分。这项研究是在当代社会关注这一主题的时候进行的，在这个社会中，个人更加活跃，他们参与的方式也得到了相当大的扩展。尽管这项活动加强了，但在某些群体--穷人、种族和少数民族、妇女、移民--进入参与制度的有效性方面仍存在巨大差异。这项调查的核心关切是将重点放在这些群体上，以便更好地了解主要社会和政治机构代表谁的利益以及忽视谁的利益。通过分析一些公民变得活跃而另一些公民不活跃的过程，研究人员可能会产生实用知识，以处理平等代表的民主理想与现实之间的差距。调查人员将进行一项精心设计的全面实证研究，其主要目的之一是开发有关参与美国生活的数据资源。为了获得具有代表性的政治活跃受访者样本，调查人员将对15,000名受访者进行约10分钟的电话筛查调查。随后将对2000名受访者进行60分钟的面对面采访，受访者倾向于积极分子。这项研究设计将允许研究人员筛选和采访足够多的少数族裔和高度活跃的参与者，以实现结果的最大可靠性和有效性。这项研究的结果将产生关于谁参与政治活动的重要发现，并应该提供有史以来对美国政治行为的最详细描述。这项调查还将为美国的政治和志愿活动提供一幅更具理论性和细致入微的图景。

Scholars have long been interested in who does and does not participate in the voluntary social and political activities that are a fundamental part of American life. This study attends to this topic at a time in contemporary society when individuals are more active and the ways in which they participate have expanded considerably. Despite this heightened activity vast disparities exist in the effectiveness with which certain groups - - the poor, racial and ethnic minorities, women, immigrants - - are entering the participatory system. Of central concern in this investigation is a focus on these groups in order to understand better whose interests are represented and whose ignored by the major social and political institutions. By analyzing the process by which some citizens become active while others do not, the researchers may generate practical knowledge for dealing with the gap between democratic ideals of equal representation and reality. The investigators will undertake a carefully crafted and comprehensive empirical study, one of the main purposes of which will be to develop a data resource on participation in American life. In order to obtain a representative sample of politically active respondents, the investigators will conduct a telephone screener survey of approximately ten minutes in length with 15,000 respondents. This will be followed by a sixty minute face-to-face interview with 2,000 respondents that is weighted toward activists. This research design will allow the researchers to screen for, and interview, enough minorities and highly active participators to achieve maximum reliability and validity of results. The output of this research will yield important findings about who participates in political activities and should provide the most detailed description of American political behavior ever available. The investigation will also produce a much more theoretical and nuanced picture of American political and voluntary activity.