What You Do Depends on Where YouAre: Community Heterogeneity and Participation.

In light of America’s increasing diversity, research into the impact of community heterogeneity on civic and political participation has burgeoned in recent years. To date, the literature on the subject has revealed an intriguing inconsistency about the participatory consequences of heterogeneity In his recent book Democracy in Suburbia, Oliver finds that people who live in communities with greater economic diversity have higher levels of engagement in localized political action, like voting in local elections and contacting local elected officials. Likewise, a forthcoming book by Gimpel et al argues that heterogeneity leads to greater political engagement. In contrast, a number of economists have found that economic, racial, and ethnic heterogeneity all lead to a decrease in participation. However, in a recent review essay surveying this literature, Dora Costa and Matthew Kahn note that fifteen recent papers by economists on the subject of community heterogeneity all conclude that heterogeneity reduces civic engagement. While at first glance the economic and political science literatures appear to be empirically incompatible, a closer look reveals that they are actually theoretically consistent with one another. It is important to note that these apparently divergent studies have examined different forms of participation. Mistakenly, the literature on participation often indiscriminately groups disparate activities together, notwithstanding considerable evidence that various forms of participation are qualitatively different from one another. Recently, Scott Keeter and his colleagues have conducted a massive study of participation in the United States, and upon analyzing an array of different activitiesconcluded that there are essentially three participatory dimensions (Jenkins et al. 2003). “Civic” activity, by which they mean non-political efforts like volunteering in the community, is a different dimension of participation than activity that communicates political preferences. This paper reconciles the seeming contradiction regarding the effect of heterogeneity on participation. It shows that civic activity, like volunteering, is facilitated in homogeneous places, while people are more likely to express political voice in communities that are heterogeneous. Furthermore, it demonstrates that the most theoretically coherent and analytically consistent type of heterogeneity is not racial or economic (the focus of the current literature). Instead, it is ideological heterogeneity. The analysis employs the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, which consists of representative samples drawn in 40 communities across the U.S. Because of the study’s hierarchical design, it is possible to construct aggregate measures of heterogeneity for each community in the sample, including the dispersion of political ideology (operationalized simply as the standard deviation of political ideology within the community). These data, however, also require attention to the statistical complexities of hierarchical data, and are thus modeled using hierarchical linear modeling. This method of estimation simultaneously accounts for individual- and contextual-level variables, ensuring that each of the model’s parameters is measured with the appropriate standard errors. In sum, this paper offers a theoretically-grounded explanation for an apparent contradiction in the literature on community heterogeneity and participation, thus helping to illuminate the impact of diversity on America’s civic landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]