The Private Roots of Public Action: Gender, Equality, and Political Participation (review)

The Private Roots of Public Action: Gender, Equality, and Political Participation. By Nancy Burns, Kay L. Schlozman, and Sidney Verba. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001; pp. xiv + 453. $27.95.

This book cognitively connects the dots between two streams of participatory effects—the social roots of political participation and gender disparity in political action. Its clarity and comprehensiveness provide an explanatory model for others in the field. While utilitarian in its analytical structure, it offers theoretical underpinnings for the techniques used, thereby persuading the reader of its methodological validity.

While a number of studies have depicted the gender differences in political participation, few have explained the antecedents of these differences. This book provides a theoretical framework for explaining both the factors of participation and the differences in them between women and men. The underlying thesis of the book is that women are less likely than men to have the resources that foster political participation, the recruitment opportunities to get involved, and the psychological orientations to predispose them toward politics.

One of the virtues of this book is that it decompartmentalizes politics from the rest of people's lives. The key factors of political participation—resources, recruitment, and psychological orientation—are rooted in social institutions. The family, the school, the workplace, nonpolitical organizations, and the church provide mechanisms for political socialization and the development of civic skills. Within these social institutions, women and men have different experiences. This study examines the processes by which these institutions provide incubators for political participation. By way of example, one's family situation lays the groundwork for educational opportunities and attainment, which influence placement in the workforce and social organizations, which affect one's resources, recruitment opportunities, and psychological orientation toward political action. In this way, these processes occur as a "chain of connections" among people's institutional involvements (199).

One of the noteworthy findings of this work is that women's political activity is not necessarily dampened by the responsibilities of family life, especially marriage and motherhood, but that for men, family life spurs them into ambitious workforce pursuits, which in turn provide greater access to political involvement. In this finding, the authors disconfirm the common interpretation of the effects of familial obligation (and its concomitant effect on leisure time) on one's political endeavors. By so doing, they render the notion of private roots of public action de novo. Another contribution made by this book is the empirical examination of the Civic Voluntarism Model first offered by the authors in the early 1990s. This model of political participation epitomizes the concept of the "institutional grounding of the [political] process" (198). By encompassing the various factors that facilitate participation—resources, location in networks of recruitment, and psychological involvement in politics—the model provides a comprehensive analytical framework in which to study the differences and similarities between women and men as they engage in political life. The authors apply this model to the analysis of extensive survey data, explaining that surveys and random samples are instruments of democratic voice used to examine the "interlocking pieces of a complex puzzle" of political participation (3). While comprehensive data analysis is one strength of this study, two measurement limitations are the utilization of data that are more than a decade old and the exclusion of Internet use as one of the measures of media exposure. It is anticipated that future research employing this model will address these timely concerns.

The bottom-line conviction asserted in this book and documented through the authors' empirical studies is that women and men differ in political participation because they differ in the key participatory factors of resources, recruitment, and psychological orientation. Due to gender differences in the broad spectrum of their social experiences, women have fewer resources and opportunities to develop a taste for politics. Nonetheless, and as a final note, the authors explain that where and when women do run for political...