ABSTRACT
A great deal of theoretical thinking and sophisticated explanatory models are often employed in the analysis of political participation inequalities. We often painstakingly look into the possible theoretical limitations and generality of our findings. This chapter starts with a cursory presentation of the methodological issues and of author's experiences with cross-national surveys, which led him to question the non-contextualized replication of survey questions, and to critically consider issues of comparability and validity. It presents the methodological work involved in the design of the Belo Horizonte area survey questions, followed by the presentation of the findings and discusses that how they disclosed higher levels of participation in general, and among women, in particular. The psycholinguists argue that the attempt to understand how respondents understand the questions in a survey inevitably leads to search for information about how people understand the world around them and how they communicate with each other.
