ABSTRACT
Inquiries into the health of civil society and engagement in public life have long rooted their accounts in citizens’ personal traits and social standing (Almond & Verba, 1963; Habermas, 1979; Rosenstone & Hansen, 1993; Tocqueville, 1835/1840; Verba, Schlozman, & Brady, 1995). For many years, individuals’ characteristics and connections were considered the keys to understanding differences in involvement in the public sphere, with age, gender, education, race, employment status, church attendance, residential stability, and general sociability the key factors explaining participation. More recently, scholars such as John Coleman (1990), Robert Putnam (1992), and Francis Fukuyama (1995) have theorized that these dispositional and situational factors may in fact be discrete indicators of latent constructs such as community integration, network membership, and a commitment to civic virtues and values (see Friedland, 2001; Friedland & Shah, 2005).
