UC Berkeley

How do people get the resources they need to participate in politics? Generations of political scientists have studied how the processes that provide people with unequal money, time, education, and social capital produce inequalities in engagement with politics. This dissertation follows in that tradition. I examine the causes and consequences of three psychological resources that facilitate political engagement: knowledge about political issues, a sense of power over outcomes in one’s life, and a sense of attachment to the place one lives.Chapter One investigates an underappreciated kind of information about politics: knowledge of which social groups demand or benefit from policy proposals. My coauthor and I find evidence that this knowledge is widespread in the American public. We argue that people use information about the groups linked to policies to form issue attitudes that are stable over time and consistent across issues, qualities which prior work has argued are limited to only the most-informed citizens. Chapter Two moves from knowledge about politics to the next stage of political engagement:participation in civic and political life. Drawing on literature from social psychology, I argue that people who generally feel more power over outcomes in their lives participate more in politics. Because people from higher-status socioeconomic backgrounds tend to feel more efficacious than those from less-advantaged households, the sense of power is one in a long list of resources that allow the well-off to participate in politics at higher rates than others. Chapter Three contributes to an emerging literature on the political implications of the sense of attachment people feel to the places they live. I argue that people who feel the place they live is part of their sense of self should trust more in the people and institutions associated with the place. In a large survey, I find that Americans who identify with the place where they live have higher social and political trust and participate in civic life at higher rates. In summary, the first chapter of this dissertation finds reason for optimism about inequalities in psychological resources, documenting a widespread form of political knowledge that allows more people than previously thought to form stable and consistent issue positions. The second chapter is less optimistic, introducing an additional source of advantage for well-off people in political participation. The implications of my final chapter are less clear; more work on place identity is needed to understand how it affects the distribution of social and political trust in the mass public. Taken together, these chapters underscore that to understand inequalities in political participation, researchers must look beyond traditional socioeconomic resources to psychological resources like knowledge, efficacy, and trust.