Politics & Society
Опубликовано на портале: 10-01-2003
Laura Morales Diez de Ulzurrun
Politics & Society.
2002.
No. 3.
P. 497-523.
Organizational membership seems to be linked to a more participatory and informed
political culture, to foster electoral participation, and to promote positive feelings
toward democracy. More recently, the social capital and associative democracy debates
have introduced new arguments about the positive effects of associational involvement.
However, little attention has been paid to the problems of measuring associational
involvement and to their consequences for our theories. This article discusses the
various problems of validity and reliability of our measurements of associational
membership. It is shown that different questionnaire for-mats produce substantially
different results. The article also addresses the issue of measurement errors and
emphasizes the problems they introduce when doing cross-national comparisons.
