Democratic Congruence between Government and Associations.

Democratic theorists are debating the degree to which the "congruence" of associational institutions with national democratic institutions can and should act as a support (or "transmission belt," in Nancy Rosenblum's words) for national democracy, by training and socializing citizens in democratic character. After considering these theories and previous research, the paper examines the relationships between specific organizational institutions (elections, formal membership, parliamentary procedure, and so on) on members' attitudes of generalized trust, internal and external efficacy and regime support and behavioral participation through voter turnout and campaign engagement. The 1996 National Election Study affords a unique opportunity to combine a deep field of political variables with the characteristics of a set of voluntary associations mentioned by respondents. Institutional data on authority structures in fifty-nine large associations are imputed to NES respondents who mentioned them in new data from the NES 1996 Auxiliary File on Group Memberships. Factor-analytic measurement models provide latent constructs of organizational democracy, membership constitutionality and organizational success at the associational level and the outcome variables at the respondent level. Findings are generally weak or null; there is ample institutional variation among the large associations, but relatively little evidence of congruence effects, with the exception of some tenuous findings of congruence for generalized trust and internal efficacy and a hint of a relationship for external efficacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]