Conviction and its Consequences.

Standard accounts of political participation - emphasizing social structure, civic skills, registration laws, and elite mobilization - all have something valuable to say about who takes part in politics and who stays home. Largely missing from these accounts, however, are citizens themselves. What citizens want from politics, what they care about, is not much part of the standard story. The purpose of our paper is to argue that a more complete and satisfying understanding of political action requires taking into account the political priorities and concerns of common citizens, and furthermore, that the best way to think about such priorities and concerns is in terms of conviction. To try to make our case, we introduce and develop the idea of conviction, suggest how conviction should be situated within the standard theory of political action, present a set of empirical indicators of conviction drawn from our survey of Atlanta and Detroit carried out in the late fall of 2000, and then, using these same data, test whether conviction motivates political action. We find that conviction does indeed contribute independently to participation: in Atlanta and Detroit, for blacks and whites, for men and women, and for political participation in many of its various forms. In the paper’s final section, we draw out the implications of our results for a theory of political action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]