Does Public Policy Shape Political Mobilization? Extending the Soss/Campbell/Mettler Framework to Analysis of Urban Policy and Neighborhood Participation.

This paper tests whether the state-centered model of political involvement, as developed in research on citizens'experiences with key federal government programs, applies to city governments' efforts to empower neighborhood-based participation. Drawing upon survey data for 29 cities from Putnam's Social Capital Benchmark Survey in 2000, U.S. Census data and content analysis of each of the 29 cities' newspapers for 1999, the paper tests for the impacts of both empowerment and reactionary mobilization, while controlling for key demographic predictors, city size, and institutional arrangements of city government. The key results show that (a) rates of neighborhood association involvement are higher in cities with larger black populations and that (b) higher levels of neighborhood empowerment by city governments' have the perverse effect of depressing rates of neighborhood association involvement. An interpretation of this result as a manifestation of free-rider logic is introduced. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]