Social Development and Political Participation: Class, Organizations and Sex

The relationship between social development and political participation has been described by Nie, Powell, and Prewitt in terms of two major contentions: (1) social development leads to increases in both the relative size of the middle class and the scope of the organizational infrastructure; (2) both factors lead in turn to higher rates of political participation, but the one ‐ socioeconomic status ‐ is mediated by civic attitudes, while the other ‐ organizational involvement ‐ is not. In trying to assess these contentions in relation to Norway, the present study arrives at several interesting, but disparate, conclusions: (a) existing findings with relevance for the problem (Martinussen's Distant Democracy) are open to reinterpretation; (b) in a highly developed corporate‐pluralist state such as Norway, organizational involvement must be distinguished as to its dependent‐variable and independent‐variable characteristics; (c) occupational status must be problematized as a sexist indicator; (d) class characteristics are not important determinants of participation in Norway, but sex is; (e) in relation to involvement in the electoral channel, civic attitudes do not mediate class position as much as they mediate sex; and (f) in relation to involvement in the corporate (interest‐group) channel, neither sex nor class are significantly mediated by attitudes. Finally, it is pointed out that the relevance of these findings for the Nie‐Powell‐Prewitt position is uncertain, due to the problematic operationalization of both sex and organizational involvement in the original study*.