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Kenny J Whitby, "Impact of organizational vitality on Black voter turnout in the South" Party Politics, 21 (March 2015), 234-245. [Available at http://ppq.sagepub.com/content/vol21/issue2/]
One of the major functions of political organizations in a democratic society is to ‘serve as channels for involving people in politics’ (Lipset, 1960: 26). From the perspective of voter participation, vibrant organizations should be able to increase voter turnout levels by reducing some of the perceived costs of citizen participation to the point at which the perceived costs of voting no longer outweigh the perceived benefits. If this conception of voter turnout is correct, then strong political organizations with ties to the Black community should be able to mitigate the costs of voting for Black citizens and thereby increase their turnout levels.
Table 1: NAACP units in countries (2005) Table 2: Democratic party organizational strength at the country level (2004-2005) Table 3: Model of the effect of organizational presence on county-level Black voter turnout in November 2004 elections Table 4: Models of the effect of organizational presence on county-level Black voter turnout in November 2004 by two levels of urbanization in counties Table 5: Models of the effect of organizational presence and party strength on county-level Black voter turnout in the November 2004 elections by urbanization levels Table 6: Descriptive statistics for county-level data in Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina and South Carolina This
study, of course, focuses on a small subset of county party
organizations located in the South; some caution should be exercised in
making generalizations based on the findings. Even so, there are
reasons to believe that the results of the analysis presented here
might extend to other regions of the Union. Black political behaviour
does not differ significantly from region to region, despite the
existence of distinctive political cultures in the South and non-South.
Blacks are a cohesive voting bloc, and they are loyal supporters of the
Democratic Party at this juncture. Hence, one strongly suspects that
the organizational presence of the NAACP and the campaign activities of
the party organization will be influential regardless of region, having
controlled for other political dynamics and demographic factors.
Nonetheless, future research on the topic will pay dividends if the
investigation is expanded to include the non-South and the voting
behaviours of other demographic groups. |