ABSTRACT
In their 1972 book, Participation in America: Political Democracy and Social Equality, Sidney Verba and Norman H. Nie develop a “group consciousness model” of political participation as an alternative to the standard socioeconomic model: “It predicts that a sense of group consciousness leads citizens to participate well beyond what their socioeconomic status would predict” (p. 257). The model works particularly well for African-Americans whose participation rates matched or exceeded those of comparably educated whites.
