ABSTRACT
In our introduction to this volume, we observed that one of the primary problems in research on urban politics was the inadequacy of many research designs for simultaneously assessing the competing accounts of responses to dissatisfaction. Given the comprehensive nature of the model outlined in the previous chapter, our research design, as built into the Lexington and Louisville study, must be quite rigorous. Even the most basic features of the EVLN model cannot be adequately tested without gathering detailed and extensive survey data based on independent samples of individuals living in a wide variety of spatially defined communities. These communities, moreover, must be drawn from a variety of different urban settings exhibiting varying levels of correspondence between the boundaries of these various social worlds and the local governmental jurisdictions that serve them. Such a strategy is necessitated by the need not only to control for varying levels of correspondence, but also to ensure that sufficient numbers of citizens will be interviewed within each correspondence and social world condition to control for nonsituational factors that are the focus of the traditional political participation literature, including those arising from individual-level predispositions, social and economic status, and cultural factors. By now, then, the logic underlying the design outlined in chapter 1 and its critical importance to this enterprise should be evident.
