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Polit Behav (2013) 35:453479
DOI 10.1007/s11109-012-9212-2
ORIGINAL PAPER
Jennifer Fitzgerald
Published online: 3 November 2012 Springer Science+Business Media New York 2012
Abstract How do regular people dene the term political? This original study gives Americans and Canadians an opportunity to express their interpretations of the concept. It identies a great deal of inter-personal variation in terms of how many and what kinds of topics people perceive as the stuff of politics. And this variation comes in predictable patterns: the ndings reveal correlations between socio-political attributes (such as gender, nationality and ideology) and the boundaries people draw around the political domain. The study also provides insight into the ways people distinguish the political from the non-political in their minds. And importantly, individuals interpretations of the term politics relate systematically to other measures of self-reported political behavior including political interest and frequency of political discussion. These results can be used to rene survey analysis and to broaden knowledge of day-to-day citizen politics.
Keywords The political Categorization Comparative political behavior
Validity United States Canada
The eld of political behavior has benetted in recent years from research that examines the cognitive and habitual connections between individuals and the political realm. People connect with politics on a day-to-day basis by taking an interest in political affairs and following political events; they engage in politics by talking with others about political issues. Among political scientists, there seems to be growing consensus that the hard-to-see dimensions of routine political behavior warrant greater attention. Yet gaining insight into the nexus between ordinary people and the world of politics is difcult because it tends to reside in spheres that are socially intimate and
J. Fitzgerald (&)
Department of Political Science, University of Colorado at Boulder, 333 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309, USAe-mail: [email protected]
What does Political Mean to You?
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psychological. As a result, researchers have applied innovative techniques such as snowball sampling (Huckfeldt and Mendez 2008), participant observation (Walsh 2004), focus groups (Conover, Searing and Crewe 2004) and quasi-experimentation (Klofstad 2009) to study informal political behavior.
These advances make it an exciting time to work in this area of research. They also make it a propitious time to step back and pose some fundamental questions about how regular people...