ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a broad view of citizen participation, defining it as the involvement of any person in purposeful activity directed at a governmental decision maker with the intent of influencing his/her decision or action. It focuses on citizen participants, and whether they perceive their participation as effective. Citizen participation has been recognized as being especially important in affecting environmental issues in the United States. Potential respondents were divided into three categories: very active, who participated in environmental issues regularly and extensively; moderately active, who participated fairly often; and slightly active, who had participated at least once. Among the participation indicators number of topics and number of organization memberships tended to have larger coefficients than hours per week spent on environmental issues. Occupation showed the same pattern of relationships, with generally smaller coefficients. Older persons tend to have less education; when education enters the regression equation the relationships of age to participation and effectiveness virtually disappear.
