Political Activity of American Citizens

The aim of this paper is to make a modest contribution toward improved understanding of how the political process actually operates in America. It reports the results of some research on individual citizen participation in political activity and describes a tool that may be used for classifying individuals in terms of the amount of political activity in which they engage. Finally it outlines some differences that are observed when attitudes with respect to some public personalities and issues held by the politically active portion of the citizenry are compared with attitudes of the politically inert. The research study from which the data reported here are derived is one of a long series carried out over the past five years for the Public Relations Department of the Standard Oil Company (N. J.). The primary purpose of these studies has been to find out how the company stands with the American public —to learn what virtues people credit to it and what sins they think it is committing. Research on such topics inevitably involves the question of who among the vast body of American citizens are most articulate in their feelings about big corporations and most concerned to defend or attack them. Since similar questions arise whenever the citizen's role with respect to any public issue comes up, the tools developed for corporation public relations may have much wider applicability and usefulness.