| Political scientists have been interested in the concept of political engagement---the occupation of one's attention or efforts by politics---since the discipline's founding. With each new wave of scholars, the concept and by extension the observational unit, expands, from traditional actions like voting, lobbying, canvassing, and writing checks, to actions like protests and demonstrations, that may have once been considered pathological, to those that were once considered irrelevant, like consumer purchases, and finally to those that were once impossible, like making and instantly distributing homemade videos to a worldwide audience. This dissertation explores traditional and modern forms of political participatory engagement among political interest groups, average citizens, and politically sophisticates.;The first form is one of the oldest in politics: lobbying. A seminal question for interest group scholars is which legislators interest groups target during their lobbying campaigns. Two dominate and opposing theoretical views claim that interest groups concentrate their efforts on reaching out to (1) friends, and (2) enemies. Recent empirical work on historical lobbying campaigns is scarce, and I test two major theories through a case study of birth control legalization in the 1930s that will combine qualitative archival work with statistical analysis. I find mixed evidence in support of both theories. Lobbyists tried to persuade opponents and supporters of birth control. When targeting supporters of birth control, however, lobbyists showed no signs of rebutting other pressure campaigns by opposing groups. Instead, lobbyists were more focused on specific legislative strategies for negotiating their bill through to final passage.;The second form of engagement is one of the newest: Googling. More Americans than ever now turn to the internet for information, entertainment, self-expression, and social connection. Already, their online searches for information about flu viruses and automobiles shows signs of predicting outbreaks and bestselling models. I use Google data of online searches to revisit the "minimal effects" hypothesis about campaigns with regard to online engagement. I find support for the hypothesis that campaigns spark political engagement by an average of about 50 percent over the general level of political interest in a given state. I also find evidence contrary to the popular wisdom of the 2008 campaign that Hillary Clinton ran a poor race.;The third form of engagement is affective and cognitive reactions to political issues that are grounded in partisan and ideological identities. I examine whether ideological identifiers display evidence of structured, dimensional thinking about groups, and if so, how that structure compares to another set of identifiers that do exhibit it, partisans. Traditionally, ideology has been recognized as a belief system that exhibits a coherence of opinions across a wide range of issue areas though broad, abstract principles or values and cognitive, if not logical, thought, while partisanship represents a social or psychological identity connected to a certain group(s). I investigate whether such group-oriented thought is exhibited by ideologues as well. The results of tests from American National Election Study surveys and General Social Surveys provide weak overall evidence that ideology does represent a social identity. More specifically, survey responses show greater levels of ideological coherence when answering questions that refer to groups compared with general policy questions. |
