ABSTRACT
One of the things that participation scholars know is that participation matters, for citizens, for elected officials and other elites, and more generally for political systems. The normative arguments are plentiful, and intuitively it makes sense. We also have a fair amount of empirical evidence on this point. We know that participants are different from nonparticipants with respect to social class and material needs, and sometimes with respect to ideological orientation and policy preferences. Most directly, we also know that elites reward-through the provision of favorable public policies-those who participate.
