Participation in public interest groups and campaign organizations: From rational choice to an explanation based on altruism and ethical reasoning.

Abstract

Existing rational choice models depict the decision to join public interest groups or campaign organizations as a "goods purchase." As with models of consumer purchases, prediction proceeds with only two tools: a list of valued goods and information about perceived quantities of goods and costs. Researchers tacitly assume that the details of the participation decision are idiosyncratic and therefore not worth investigating. In contrast, this dissertation presents and tests an ethical reasoning model (ERM) that seeks to explain how people come to value participation goals and how they form perceptions of the amount of intangible goods they can acquire by participating. The model rests firmly on the bedrock of psychological theories of and research on altruism and motivation. One hundred fourteen randomly selected university undergraduates completed a computer-assisted self-administered questionnaire. The interview provided them with information on a number of political and non-political groups. After selecting the two groups they found most motivating, respondents were extensively interviewed regarding their perceptions of these groups. Perceptions relevant to rational choice models and the ERM were collected, in addition to measures for tangential hypotheses. A subsequent field quasi-experiment determined whether respondents sought to attend meetings of the groups they had discussed. In a test against several prominent rational choice models, the ERM performs best in predicting subsequent participation. The ERM also withstands numerous statistical tests designed to address methodological and substantive counterhypotheses. Finally, additional tests show that the ERM has interesting, theoretically anticipated relationships with moral reasoning sophistication (a cognitive ability measure), sense of identity, political ideology, and, possibly, gender and ethnicity. These results indicate that the ERM may be a useful tool for analyzing how cognitive abilities, attitudes, and identity shape the ethical judgments that are an important influence on political participation.