The Psychological Benefits of Political Participation

This paper asks whether political participation confers psychological benefits. Four hypotheses were tested: that involvement in volunteer activities reduces subsequent psychological distress, that resisting perceived discrimination does, that the benefits of political involvement are more pronounced for respondents prone to psychological distress, and that any observed benefits of political involvement are attributable to a psychological trait. The study employed data from a long-running panel survey. Political activity appeared to be more beneficial for respondents prone to psychological distress. These findings suggest that participation is a resource that alleviates psychological distress, which might offset some of the negative mental health consequences associated with disadvantaged social status. The results are discussed in light of recent theories attributing health benefits to social capital and empowerment. Prepared for presentation at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, August 30 September 2, 2001. BENEFITS OF PARTICIPATION 1 Might political activity enhance citizens' psychological health? Contemporary theories percolating in many disciplines suggest that it should. Recently, public health researchers have taken up the rendition of social capital theory articulated by Robert Putnam, focusing on its implication that communal involvement might improve citizens' well being. Among public health researchers, medical sociologists and community psychologists, there is a long-standing claim that "empowerment," including political activity, is good for health. Last but not least, psychological health is an enduring concern for political psychologists. In this paper, I investigate the effects of political activity on individual-level mental health. Political scientists might profit from studying mental health for at least three reasons. First, the security and health of the physical body is the pre-eminent concern of the liberal state (Shklar, 1984), while psychological health is demonstrably linked to physical health (Kuzbansky & Kawachi, 2000). Second and related, both absolute and relative socioeconomic status have been associated with health outcomes (Adler & Ostrove, 1999), and it is a fundamental concern of government to assess the distribution of social and economic status and to design interventions to correct bad distributions. Third, civic well being arguably depends on good individual mental health, so that citizens can contribute not only to the economy and to civil society, but also to more explicitly political engagements such as jury service. The negative formulation of this argument, that psychological afflictions might damage the prospects for democratic politics, is an enduring concern in political psychology and political theory (Lasswell, 1930/1977; Adorno et al., 1950). How political engagements themselves might influence health outcomes is an important question, one I focus on in this paper. Besides its focus on mental health, two other features of the study I report on here are distinctive. The study treats political activity as an independent variable, and thus promises not only to expand our knowledge base regarding political participation but also to offer a more refined articulation of its consequences. Political participation is often claimed generally to be a good thing; this study offers a precise finding about individual-level health outcomes to support this claim. In addition, the study utilizes longitudinal panel data, enabling better support for inferences about the consequences of participation than studies drawing on cross-sectional data can provide. I begin this paper by reminding readers that mental health has an important place in the study of political psychology. Next I locate my investigation in the context of recent discussions of social capital and empowerment. Then I introduce my research questions and specific hypotheses about the effects of political participation on mental health. I test these hypotheses using data from the Young Women cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey. I conclude with an evaluation of whether some forms of political involvement are more beneficial than others, and with a comment about what light the findings shed on the ongoing concerns identified in the literatures discussed earlier. BENEFITS OF PARTICIPATION 2 Theoretical background Three major theoretical traditions articulate questions that resonate with those I pursue in this paper. First, links between psychological well-being and politics are at the core of political psychology’s longer-standing interdisciplinary tradition. Second, scholars adapting the social capital perspective enunciated for political scientists by Robert Putnam are now pursuing connections between social capital and health outcomes. Third, students of “empowerment” have postulated links between political power and health for well over a decade. Political psychology, social capital, and empowerment Mental health and illness raise questions that are germane to the field of political psychology. Harold Lasswell's work initiated and exemplified the political psychological study of mental health, inspiring, for example, Marcus’ early work on the relationships between unconventional political activity and psychological distress (1969). Contemporary scholars remain fascinated by questions that engage mental health, as exemplified by Rahn and her colleagues' recent explorations of "public mood" (1996), and by Robert Lane’s exploration of the loss of happiness in market democracies (2000). For the most part, political psychologists who directly engage mental health and illness attend to the question of how psychological conditions influence political outcomes, sometimes suggesting “psychopathology” as a metaphor for political dysfunction. In this vein, Rubenstein and Lasswell’s fascinating study of political processes in a psychiatric hospital was intended to illuminate the processes of democratization in former colonies in Africa (1966). Political theorists also see psychological disruption as a metaphor for and a cause of political dysfunction. Pursuing political theory's interest in political subjectivity, civic capacity, and the boundaries between the self and the polity, political theorists and philosophers including James M. Glass (1995), Julia Kristeva (1993) and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl (1996) have joined political psychologists like Lasswell in looking to mental disturbance to illuminate political processes. The research question I pursue here turns the focus around, looking instead at the question of how political processes influence health outcomes. In the large research tradition of efficacy studies, one finds a similar focus. According to Albert Bandura, “the inability to influence events and social conditions that significantly affect one’s life can give rise to feelings of futility and despondency as well as anxiety” (1997:153). Indeed, Bandura’s psychological approach to efficacy is never remote from politics: he declares that “people are proactive, aspiring organisms who have a hand in shaping their own lives and the social systems that organize, guide and regulate the affairs of their society” (1997:vii). Analysts of social capital claim not only that political engagement enhances civic vitality broadly construed (Putnam, 2000), but also that it will produce positive health outcomes. Public health BENEFITS OF PARTICIPATION 3 researchers now cite Putnam when they speculate about the mechanisms that might account for the oftobserved relationship between social structure and health outcomes (Marmot 1998). The public health researcher Ichiro Kawachi and his colleagues have recently published a series of articles exploring the relationship between social capital and health, frequently invoking Putnam. For example, Kawachi and colleagues linked General Social Survey measures of trust with mortality rates (1997) and social capital measured at the state level with self-rated health (1999). Richard Rose has recently argued that social capital (indicated by access to networks, friendships, a sense of personal control and trust) is more important than human capital (subjective social status, gender and income) in explaining physical and emotional well-being among Russians surveyed in 1998 (Rose, 2000). But not all recent invocations of social capital theory are accompanied by demonstrations of its positive health effects. Veenstra’s recent individual level analysis of data from Canada produced little evidence of any relationship between social capital and health, and found no influence of civic participation on health (2000). Before social capital theories arrived on the scene, public health researchers used the concept of empowerment to capture the intuition that collective action to shape social and political structures might be positively related to individual health outcomes. Empowerment theories emerged especially vigorously from the fields of public health, medical sociology and community psychology in the middle of the last decade. In the 1990s the American Journal of Community Psychology regularly featured articles on empowerment, devoting several special issues to it. The psychologist Emory Cowen remarked on this widespread attention: “the gut appeal of the concept of empowerment lies in its potential for addressing irrepressible social blights. Hence the term has come into greater use in both the professional literature and the public domain” (1994). Cowen reflects the community psychology conception of empowerment as a route to wellness, and notes that empowerment often refers to both psychological processes and “macrosocial” system change. Gibbs and Fuery exemplify the conjunction of individual psychology and broader systemic processes under the rubric of empowerment, urging the further development of a theory that would “define how individual empowerment can contribute to group empowerment, and how the increase of a group’s power can enhance the functioning of its individual members” (1994). Community psychologists studying empowerment have been quite willing to engage concepts, including political concepts, “well removed from the classically defined mental health sphere” (Cowen, 1994). Empowerment scholars have thus focused attention on group processes and individual participation in community organizations, self-help and advocacy groups (Corrigan et al., 1999; Salzer, 1997). More conventional forms of political activity have also been addressed. For example, the medical sociologist Thomas LaVeist has measured the effect of conventionally political variables – the racial composition of city council membership and the voting aged population – to explain black-white BENEFITS OF PARTICIPATION 4 differences in infant mortality (LaVeist, 1992). Rietschlin has found that voluntary association membership makes a significant independent contribution to the reduction of psychological distress (1998). Yet empowerment scholars also frequently refer to individual psychological constructs such as control or efficacy (e.g. Zimmerman, 1995; Zimmerman et al., 1992; Zimmerman & Rappoport, 1988). Trickett in 1994 suggested that psychological definitions of empowerment were becoming more prevalent than political ones (Trickett, 1994). Efficacy studies by psychologists and social capital theories both contain suggestions that the benefits of political engagement will accrue especially for members of politically and socially disadvantaged groups. However, of the three traditions discussed here, empowerment theorists have focused most keenly on the situation of previously disempowered groups: “empowerment issues are most salient and compelling when focusing on the devastating correlates and costly sequelae of society's most floridly disempowering conditions” including racial, ethnic, ageand gender-related biases (Cowen, 1994). LaVeist’s work exemplifies not only the engagement by public health and related fields with conventional political variables, but also the special attention empowerment theorists pay to the circumstances of the least privileged members of society. For him, empowerment is explicitly envisioned as a resource that might offset some of the effects of prejudice and discrimination: “in a highly segregated black community political empowerment can reduce (but not entirely eliminate) the negative consequences of segregation” (LaVeist, 1993). Research questions in light of these theories These three traditions draw on similar concepts and invoke similar claims. The links drawn in discussions of social capital between interpersonal trust, voluntary association membership and democratic engagement echo claims about the benefits of political empowerment. In a recent review essay, Hawe and Shiell (2000) have pointed out the correspondence between theories of social capital and empowerment. At least one recent reviewer sees a resonance between the works of Robert Putnam and Robert Lane (Scialabba, 2000). While advocates of empowerment frequently insist that their theory captures both individual and structural influences and outcomes, efficacy’s most famous partisan, Bandura, argues that the relationship between individual and collective efficacy must be reciprocal (1997:469). And unfortunately, both empowerment and social capital theories have lost precision as they have become more frequently invoked, as recent criticisms of empowerment by Robert Weissberg (1999) and of social capital by Alejandro Portes (1998) and Robert Jackman (1998) make clear. In this paper, I ask the question of whether political participation confers psychological benefits, looking at two different forms of participation: participation in voluntary associations and participation in activities to address workplace discrimination. Social capital, empowerment and theories from political BENEFITS OF PARTICIPATION 5 psychology have all linked communal involvements with civic and personal vitality, but the two different forms of participation I look at do not sit equally well in each of these traditions. Empowerment theories and theories of self-efficacy are both broad enough to sweep both forms of participation under their rubric: either activity investigated might be understood as “empowering” or “efficacy building” according to some theorists. Social capital theories, by contrast, have been criticized for emphasizing too much the positive aspect of communal involvements, while glossing “over the real, and often sharp, conflicts among groups in civil society” (Foley & Edwards, 1996:40). Conflictual forms of participation are as much a part of political life as communal involvements are. Investigating the potential benefits of voluntary association participation promises an endorsement of social capital theory, but looking at the potential benefits of action against workplace discrimination might challenge social capital theory. The two forms of participation afford a contrast, distinguishing more communal from more agonistic or conflictive forms of participation. To the extent that social capital theory fails to recommend or value participation in conflictual political activities, a demonstration that conflictual engagements can confer individual benefits would suggest that empowerment and efficacy theories are richer sources than social capital theory for analysts studying the relationships between social structure and health outcomes. Because it overlooks conflict and tends to forget problems of historical injustice and inequality, social capital theory offers less than does empowerment or efficacy theory to justify the second major question of this paper, whether participation benefits some people more than others. I ask whether women prone to psychological distress derive greater benefits from participation than those not prone to distress. This question follows easily from the work of community psychologists interested in self-help and advocacy groups for persons with mental illness.