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The discussion of qualitative and quantitative research methods in political science has followed a "long arc of development," according to Andrew Bennett (this symposium). He sees our bookRethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse Tools, Standards(RSI) as a "key turning point" in this development and as contributing to a more pluralistic vision of methodology. We would certainly be gratified if we have indeed made this contribution. Yet this is an ongoing discussion, and this symposium points to fruitful directions this discussion can take.

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- CONTENTS -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- 1 Introduction -- PART I -- 2 What Do We Mean by Political Voice? Does Equal Voice Matter? -- 3 The Roots of Citizen Participation: The Civic Voluntarism Model -- PART II -- 4 Who Exercises Political Voice? -- 5 The Noisy and the Silent: Divergent Preferences and Needs -- 6 Do Digital Technologies Make a Difference? -- 7 Social Movements and Ordinary Recruitment -- PART III -- 8 Who Sings in the Heavenly Chorus? The Shape of the Organized Interest System -- 9 Representing Interests through Organizational Activity -- PART IV -- 10 Growing Economic Inequality and Its (Partially) Political Roots -- 11 Has It Always Been This Way? -- 12 Can We Do Anything about It? -- 13 Unequal Voice in an Unequal Age -- Notes -- Index

Politically active individuals and organizations make huge investments of time, energy, and money to influence everything from election outcomes to congressional subcommittee hearings to local school politics, while other groups and individual citizens seem woefully underrepresented in our political system. The Unheavenly Chorus is the most comprehensive and systematic examination of political voice in America ever undertaken--and its findings are sobering. The Unheavenly Chorus is the first book to look at the political participation of individual citizens alongside th

Politically active individuals and organizations make huge investments of time, energy, and money to influence everything from election outcomes to congressional subcommittee hearings to local school politics, while other groups and individual citizens seem woefully underrepresented in our political system. The Unheavenly Chorus is the most comprehensive and systematic examination of political voice in America ever undertaken--and its findings are sobering. The Unheavenly Chorus is the first book to look at the political participation of individual citizens alongside the political advocacy of thousands of organized interests--membership associations such as unions, professional associations, trade associations, and citizens groups, as well as organizations like corporations, hospitals, and universities.

The American creed stresses political equality and political involvement, but substantial political inequality still persists from one generation to the next. Despite the importance of political inequality, not enough is known about the mechanisms that reproduce it. Political socialization research has focused on the transmission of political attitudes and culture across generations, but it has paid scant attention to how family transfers of economic resources, human capital, and social capital reproduce and perpetuate unequal patterns of political involvement and political authority. This article argues that more attention should be paid to measuring the persistence of political identity, political participation, civic engagement, and political influence networks over time and across generations. Special attention should be devoted to learning more about how the passage of family resources (economic resources, human capital, social capital, and cultural capital) from parents to children reproduces political inequality and reduces the opportunity for political mobility. Current data sources fall far short of what is needed to answer these questions, but linking the proposed American Opportunity Study with public voting records and with the American National Election Studies would provide a rich and powerful dataset for studying them. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright The American Academy of Political and Social Science.]

The American creed stresses political equality and political involvement, but substantial political inequality still persists from one generation to the next. Despite the importance of political inequality, not enough is known about the mechanisms that reproduce it. Political socialization research has focused on the transmission of political attitudes and culture across generations, but it has paid scant attention to how family transfers of economic resources, human capital, and social capital reproduce and perpetuate unequal patterns of political involvement and political authority. This article argues that more attention should be paid to measuring the persistence of political identity, political participation, civic engagement, and political influence networks over time and across generations. Special attention should be devoted to learning more about how the passage of family resources (economic resources, human capital, social capital, and cultural capital) from parents to children reproduces political inequality and reduces the opportunity for political mobility. Current data sources fall far short of what is needed to answer these questions, but linking the proposed American Opportunity Study with public voting records and with the American National Election Studies would provide a rich and powerful dataset for studying them.

What is the impact of the possibility of political participation on the Internet on long-standing patterns of participatory inequality in American politics? An August 2008 representative survey of Americans conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project provides little evidence that there has been any change in the extent to which political participation is stratified by socio-economic status, but it suggests that the web has ameliorated the well-known participatory deficit among those who have just joined the electorate. Even when only that subset of the population with Internet access is considered, participatory acts such as contributing to candidates, contacting officials, signing a political petition, or communicating with political groups are as stratified socio-economically when done on the web as when done offline. The story is different for stratification by age where historically younger people have been less engaged than older people in most forms of political participation. Young adults are much more likely than their elders to be comfortable with electronic technologies and to use the Internet, but among Internet users, the young are not especially politically active. How these trends play out in the future depends on what happens to the current Web-savvy younger generation and the cohorts that follow and on the rapidly developing political capacities of the Web. Stay logged on …