Is Civic Behavior Political? Exploring the Multidimensional Nature of Political Participation

Despite the impression that civic engagement is largely apolitical, there is growing evidence to suggest that this is not true. We demonstrate that individuals who are “civic specialists ” are engaged in a variety of non-electoral – but still political – behavior that challenges the notion of a civic/political disconnect. With a nationally representative telephone survey of adults ages 15 and older, we show that public activism can be categorized through a typology of engagement based on the distinction between civic and electoral behavior. Our data show that individuals differ in how much civic and electoral work they report, with some people focusing their participation in one sphere and not the other. But we also find that civic and electoral activists report similar rates of behavior that give expression to their political voice