ABSTRACT
Despite the recent gains in our understanding of political participation, large areas remain understudied. One such area is that of issue activists. People often become involved in politics because they care about some issue. Oddly enough, however, issues usually do not receive much attention in treatments of participation. If issues are motivators, we should be paying more attention to what kinds of issues stimulate what kinds of people. Yet there are very few sizeable studies of domain-specific issue activists, their composition, how they are recruited, their motives, and what they actually do.
