34_importancia del contexto sida

Political Behavior, Vol. 25, No. 2, June 2003 ( 2003)

THE IMPORTANCE OF SOCIAL ANDPOLITICAL CONTEXT: The Caseof AIDS Activism

M. Kent Jennings and Ellen Ann Andersen

We utilize a 1992 survey of approximately, 2500 AIDS activists to analyze their degreeof participation. Activity levels were affected by several traditional predictors, but theinclusion of contextual measures indicating the activists connection with AIDS, espe-cially the pain and loss incurred, led to a much fuller and more complex explanatorymodel. We argue that a richer comprehension of political participation requires morestudies of issue-specific activists and the specification of contexual features that serveto motivate more intensive degrees of participation.

Key words: political activists; AIDS; contextual features; survey research.

For every Martin Luther King, there are a plethora of Rosa Parksfootsoldiers in a collective effort to achieve political change. Although Parks wasclearly more than a nominal participant in the Montgomery bus boycott spe-cifically and in the civil rights movement more generally, she was not a keyleader. She did not play a major role in organizing the boycott, although sheparticipated in it throughout. Rosa Parks was, in sum, a rank-and-file activist,distinguished from many other such activists in Montgomery in that her spe-cific contribution to the civil rights movement garnered such enormous atten-tion and had such great symbolic significance.The attention accorded to Parks illuminates, paradoxically, the invisibility

of the vast majority of issue activists. Our knowledge of the contours of rank-and-file activism in specific issue domains is relatively sparse, particularly incomparison with our knowledge of the leaders and key activists in social causeson one hand, and general (e.g., electoral and community affairs) rank-and-file

M. Kent Jennings, Department of Political Science, University of California, Santa Barbara,Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9420 ([email protected]). Ellen Ann Andersen, Indiana Univer-sity, Purdue University, Indianapolis.

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0190-9320/03/0300-00177/0 2003 Plenum Publishing Corporation

JENNINGS AND ANDERSEN178

activism on the other hand. Studies focusing on rank-and-file activists typicallyseek to distinguish them from nonactivists on the basis of such factors aspersonal resources and demographic characteristics (Bobo and Gilliam, 1990;Verba and Nie, 1972), direct contact with adherents of particular causes(McAdam, 1986; Rosenstone and Hansen, 1993; Snow, Zurcher, and Ekland-Olson, 1980), and integration into particular social and voluntary networks(Fernandez and McAdam, 1988; Leege and Kellstedt, 1993; Verba, Schloz-man, and Brady, 1995).While understanding the mechanisms that serve simultaneously to push

some people into, and others out of, political activism is assuredly an impor-tant project, it is only half the story. What happens when the threshold ofactivism is crossed? Do the mechanisms that initially stimulated activism con-tinue to exert influence beyond the recruitment stage? Or do other factorscome into play? That this half of the story has been less explored than itsother half is partly attributable to research obstacles. Considerable technicaland political difficulties present themselves to scholars seeking to study rank-and-file issue activists. The most formidable problem is simply that of locatingthe subjects. Scholars utilizing the most common method of studying publicparticipationsample surveysencounter enormous difficulties in construct-ing adequate national sampling frames for issue activists. And rarely do theygarner enough issue-specific activists in the standard cross-section survey towarrant separate analysis. Scholars attempting to use organizational approachesrun into the same difficulty, but from a different direction. Activist groups arefrequently unwilling to divulge adherent databases to outsiders (including so-cial scientists); others do not even have reliable records of their foot soldiers.Then, too, local studies pose problems of generalizability.Nonetheless, a number of mainly small-scale activist surveys reveal the util-

ity of such inquiries. Of particular value are those with comparison groups, asin studies dealing with civil rights (Fendrich, 1977; McAdam, 1986), studentprotest (Jennings, 1987; Whalen and Flacks, 1989), nuclear power (Walshand Warland, 1983), the peace movement (Marullo, 1990), and abortion(Gross, 1995). These inquiries help uncover the motivational and recruitmentaspects that distinguish issue activists from nonactivists. In one of the veryrare instances in which national cross-section survey data have yielded enoughissue-specific respondents for detailed analysis, Verba et al. (1995, p. 407)demonstrated that intense attitudes about abortion had an independent effecton overall political activity, although similarly intense attitudes about schoolprayer did not. They also showed that traditional explanations of activism pro-vided a better fit for pro-choice activists than for pro-life activists (p. 413).Even such studies zeroing in on issue activists, however, generally do notdistinguish levels of activism among these activists, two exceptions beingRothenbergs (1992) comparison between rank-and-file and more activist

THE IMPORTANCE OF SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CONTEXT 179

members of Common Cause and Olivers (1984) comparison of active andtoken participants in neighborhood organizations.Although studies of activists seldom treat both the intensity and range

of issue activism, they do highlight the crucial need for sensitivity to specificcontexts in explanations of rank-and-file activism. While these contextual vari-ables are unlikely to account for the entirety of an issue activists commitment,neither should they be treated as irrelevant. As Brady (1999) observes in des-ignating areas in need of further research:

Most models of participation emphasize factors affecting the supply of participation.. . . Little attention is devoted to those factors, typically the political and social con-text of an individual, that create a demand for political participation. These factorsinclude the issues that motivate participation. . . . Most people get involved in poli-tics because they care about some issue, but most models of participation give shortshrift to issues. (p. 796)

If caring about an issue helps motivate an individual to cross the activitythreshold, it seems plausible that degrees and types of caring about woulddistinguish levels of activism. That being the case, it becomes necessary tospecify the particular contextual factors that, in effect, operationalize the con-cept of caring.In this article we utilize a survey of rank-and-file AIDS activists to examine

the factors that influence the degree of involvement in one issue arena. AIDSis an epidemic that not only drastically affects individual lives but one thatalso became politically charged because of the controversy surrounding thenature and suppression of its transmission, its concentration in identifiablepopulation segments, the high costs of medical care, and the priorities to beassigned to seeking a cure (Albert, 1989; Epstein, 1996; Perrow and Guillen,1990; Stipp and Kerr, 1989). Although the specific features that distinguishAIDS from many other issue domains impose obvious limitations on the gen-eralizability of our inquiry, they serve at the same time to highlight the factthat many issue domains are likely to have distinctive properties. Taking thesedifferences into account should be an integral part of studying political activ-ists.Our goals are twofold. One goal is to assess the extent to which traditional

markers of mobilization to collective action also serve to signal the intensityof activism once the threshold of participation has been crossed. In this re-spect we build on and add to the substantial body of knowledge dealing withpolitical participation in general, particularly models that stress social status,social networks, political resources, and ideological fervor.Our second, more innovative goal is to weigh the impact of context-specific

factors on levels of activism. If, as we have argued, domain-specific activism


calls for domain-specific explanatory factors, we need to introduce and evalu-ate indicators of relevant life situations and contexts uniquely associated withAIDS. We focus on specific measures that signify what it means to care aboutan issue. In doing so we will also be able to delineate the relative effects ofgeneral and contextual variables in structuring the magnitude of issue ac-tivism. We use AIDS as the particular issue domain, but posit that comparableanalysis in other issue arenas is warranted. Assuming that context-specificcharacteristics provide leverage in accounting for levels of AIDS activism, wewill have provided some basis for extending the approach to other issue do-mains.

THE ACTIVISTS SAMPLE

In 1992, the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt was displayed in itsentirety on the mall in Washington DC.1 At that time, the Quilt was composedof some 20,000 individual panels, most of them made by individuals who hadlost a loved one to the disease. The Quilt was displayed for 3 days, requiringthe participation of around 4,000 volunteers to set up and break down theQuilt each day, staff information booths, check in new Quilt panels, protectthe Quilt from damage, and sundry other tasks associated with a project ofthis size. The display offered an unusual opportunity to study the normallyhidden foot soldiers of a political cause. With the cooperation of the NAMESProject we conducted a national, mail questionnaire survey of people whopreregistered as volunteers.2 These preregistrants consisted of a self-identifiedgroup of individuals who were concerned about AIDS and who, by theirinvolvement in this mass demonstration, manifested at least one commonlyperceived mode of political participation. Mail questionnaires were sent to4,008 preregistrants approximately two months preceding the display. The ini-tial mailing plus one follow-up postcard reminder yielded 2,525 returned, us-able questionnaires for an unadjusted response rate of 63%very respectablefor a mail survey and equal to or better than mail surveys of political partyactivists (Miller and Jennings, 1986, ch. 1).It is difficult to estimate possible bias among the respondents due to the

unavailability of baseline data for the target population of preregistrants. Onecharacteristic of the target population, state of residence, is known. Not sur-prisingly, given the site of the display in Washington DC, approximately one-third of all preregistrants hailed from the District of Columbia, Maryland, andVirginia. Correspondingly, about one-third of the respondents come fromthose three areas, a figure equaled by representation from the populous statesof California, New York, and Texas. The overrepresentation of DC area resi-dents from the pool of preregistrants (and subsequently from our sample)poses a problem to the extent that local volunteers differ systematically from


long-distance preregistrants. We control for this possibility in the multivariateanalysis.3

Although the sample appears to be reasonably representative of all preregis-trants, how well it represents AIDS activists as of that time more generallyremains problematic. In light of our emphasis on moving beyond standardpredictors of issue activism rather than making definitive statements about AIDSactivism as such, the question of generalizing to a larger population is of sec-ondary importance. Nevertheless, we need to address the issue of representa-tiveness. No known parameters of AIDS activists exist, but several possiblebiases are present in the sample. One type of bias almost certainly exists. Thecommemorative nature of the Quilt enterprise represents the softer side ofAIDS activism, in contrast to the more aggressive, occasionally disruptive tac-tics favored by groups such as ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power(Halcli,, 1999). The display probably drew a disproportionate number of lessrevolutionary activists as preregistrants. In addition, because attending theQuilt display costs time and money, the preregistrants may have been morewell-to-do than AIDS activists as a whole.4 Another source of possible biasconcerns race. Nine-tenths of the sample identified themselves as white, withthe remainder being scattered across a number of racial and ethnic categories.This lack of diversity mirrors the racial splits over AIDS-related activism(Cohen, 1999; Kayal, 1993).Finally, the sample is necessarily limited by historical timing. In 1992, AIDS

was still commonly viewed as a disease affecting only gay men.5 As the visibil-ity of AIDS among other population groups increased, the cast of activistschanged. Thus, a sample of activists taken 5 to 10 years later would haveyielded a different social composition, a not uncommon phenomena in politi-cal movements. In light of the difficulties associated with surveying rank-and-file activists, however, these sources of sampling bias seemed acceptable, es-pecially given our belief that the preregistrants would be heterogeneous withrespect to life experiences, sexual orientation, and political activity levels.It has become a truism to note that activists differ from nonactivists and

the general public in a number of respects, especially with regard to politicalresources. Nevertheless, the AIDS activists present an especially impressiveprofile, as Table 1 demonstrates. They are highly educated, have householdincomes well above the national average, and are relatively young. Accordingto their own self-assessments, they are also avid followers of public affairs. TheAIDS activists break company with nonideological and conservative activists intheir extreme liberal ideological orientation, as indicated by their self-locationson the libcon scale (Table 1). Then, too, four-fifths of them identified withthe Democratic party and nine-tenths voiced their intention of supporting BillClinton in the 1992 election. By any standard, these activists fall into theliberal camp.


TABLE 1. A Profile of AIDS Activists

Education

High School Some College Some Post-or Less College Degree Post-Grad Grad Degree

7% 28% 22% 15% 29%

Household Income

21,000 31,000 51,000


A striking departure from most other arrays of issue activists consists of thebreakdown by sexual orientation. Straight men composed only five percent ofthe respondents, outnumbered nearly 3:1 by lesbian women, 7:1 by straightwomen, and 10:1 by gay men. These proportions, while quite divergent frommost activist groups, agree in general with more impressionistic estimates ofAIDS movement participants of that era (Sturken, 1997, pp. 156157, 204206). The prominence of gay men is unsurprising in light of the extent towhich they had borne the brunt of the epidemics effects. The reason for thevaried representation of other groups is less clear. Sturken suggests that theabsence of straight men can be accounted for by homophobia andin thecase of Quilt-related activitiestheir disdain for quilting and sewing (pp.204205). She also suggests that both straight and lesbian women have in-volved themselves in numbers disproportionate to sheer self-interest as aproduct of womens traditional involvement in caregiving. Other scholars haveposited that the involvement of lesbian women is at least partially a functionof the interaction between gender and sexual orientation (Densham, 1997).

MAGNITUDE AND VARIETIES OF ACTIVISM

Even standing alone, the demanding organizational efforts of the preregis-trants at the Quilt display would ordinarily qualify them as activists. However,the AIDS-related activism of most of the preregistrants went far beyond theQuilt display work. The questionnaire contained a quite demanding batteryconsisting of seven activities cross-cut by 16 issue domains, including AIDS.6

For each issue domain, the respondents were asked to indicate whether theyhad ever signed a petition, attended a meeting, contacted a public official,contributed money, been an active member of an organization affiliated withthe issue, attended a rally or demonstration, or complained to or boycotted abusiness.As Figure 1 reveals, all acts in the AIDS domain had been performed by

substantial numbers of individuals, but the frequencies vary considerably. Atraditional explanation asserts that variations in the demands and difficultiesassociated with particular acts account for differential rates of participatoryacts. At first glance, that explanation seems to hold in the case of these AIDSactivists. Proportions range from about one-third for complaining to or boy-cotting a business to nearly four-fifths for contributing money. Contributingmoney is an easier act than contacting an official, which would seem to sup-port the principle of low opportunity costs. On the other hand, signing a peti-tion requires essentially no more skill than does writing a check (though pre-sumably the latter requires more financial wherewithal). Similarly, attendinga rally or demonstration could easily involve more time than contacting anofficial.


FIG. 1. Specific activities in AIDS issue domain.

These departures from the ease of action rule point toward another facili-tating factor, namely, opportunity and availability (Leighley, 1995; Rosenstoneand Hansen, 1993). Petitions cannot be signed unless a drive is under way andpotential signers are presented with a petition. By the same token, boycotts orcomplaints are unlikely acts unless there is an organized campaign. At theother end of the scale, requests for money are routinely made to potentialdonors, and organizational meetings may not only be regularly scheduled butare advertised in advance. Thus, even among these AIDS activists, and byextension to other issue activists as well, the opportunity to engage in a specificact structures the frequency of their performance, along with the traditionalrequirements of wherewithal and commitment.Variations across the seven activities are important in and of themselves,

but for present purposes we combined the responses to form a cumulativeindex, with each activity being given equal weight. The resulting index, whichwill constitute the dependent variable in the following analysis, ranges from 0to 7 and has an alpha reliability coefficient of .81. This index is a reasonableproxy for activism intensity, because those who engage in such high initiativebehaviors as contacting public officials also typically engage in lower initiative


behaviors such as signing petitions or contributing money. As Table 2 shows,the index has a wide distribution, with a slight skew toward the high end.Even those scoring 0 on this particular index, however, would ordinarily becoded as contemporary activists by dint of their considerable investment inhelping mount and monitor the Quilt display. In addition, nearly one-half ofthose scoring 0 claimed to have been active in some respect within the pastyear despite not having performed any of the seven actions listed in the activ-ity battery. Finally, one-third of those scoring 0 also reported belonging to anAIDS-related organization other than a NAMES Project chapter, althoughthey apparently did not consider them to be political organizations as such.Virtually all of the respondents also qualify as multimovement activists.

Nine-tenths reported some involvement in at least two causes and one-fifthreported activity in 10 or more causes. The mean number of causes engagedin was 7.6, a figure that drops to 6.7 if AIDS is excluded from the base.While some of the activism occurred in the past, very substantial proportionsindicated that they had been active within the past year, the average numbersbeing 5.3 and 4.4 with AIDS included and excluded from the base, respec-tively. These figures provide additional support for the politically activist na-ture of the sample.

TRADITIONAL AND NOVEL EXPLANATORY FACTORS

Setting out the likely predictors of intense participation within a group ofissue activists requires the inclusion of measures traditionally related to partic-ipation rates and measures that are relevant to the issue domain at hand. Weestablished four clusters of predictors. Social traits include the conventionalcharacteristics of education, household income, and age. Each of these is posi-tively related to most, though not all, forms of political participation.7

TABLE 2. Distribution on the AIDS Activity Index

Number of Acts Percentage N

0 7.4 1851 13.1 3272 9.0 2253 10.7 2674 13.3 3335 12.3 3076 16.4 4097 17.7 443

Totals 100.0 2,496

Note: Mean = 4.0; SD = 2.29.


Also included in the social trait cluster are sex and sexual orientation. Dueto the nature of the affected population, we can reasonably expect gays to bemore active than straights. In keeping with the increasingly modest differencesfound in studies of political participation (e.g. Burns, Scholzman, and Verba,2001, ch. 3; Conway, 2002), as traditionally defined, we would expect men tobe marginally more active than women.8 However, AIDS activists are unusualin terms of the combinations of sex and sexual orientation represented andthe likely forces that animate political action within the combinations. In orderto allow for the play of possible interaction effects between sex and sexualorientation, four dummy variables were createdgay men, straight men,lesbian women, and straight women. In the multivariate analysis to follow,gay men will be the omitted (comparison) group. Considering the diseasesepidemiology and the level of social and political organization within the gaycommunity, we would expect gay men to be especially active.A second cluster of variables, often associated with resource-rich social

traits, consists of psychological engagement in politics. We posit the usualpositive connection between engagement and activity; engagement comesclose to being a necessary though not sufficient condition for heavy invest-ments in political action. One measure, political interest, is based on the singlestandard question of how often people follow what is going on in governmentand public affairsmost of the time, some of the time, only now and then,or hardly at all (see Table 1). A second measure, political competence, is anindex based on responsesoffered in a 5-point Likert-style formatto fourstatements dealing with the respondents self-appraisals as to how qualifiedthey are to take part in politics.9 The answers were summed and then rescaledto produce a 5-point index running from 04, with a mean of 2.6 and an alphacoefficient of .84.The third cluster of predictors includes two measures of political ideology.

Strong commitment to causes and allegiances to principles can serve as amotivating element for political participation, as witnessed routinely at themass public level in the bearing that strength of party identification andliberalconservative orientation have on general measures of participation(Brady, 1999, pp. 762763). We wished to have measures of ideology thatwent beyond the specific arena of AIDS politics and that also captured aricher depiction of ideology than the standard 7-point liberalconservativeself-placement scale noted previously. To that end we constructed two indexesbased on a factor analysis of 0100 feeling thermometer ratings applied to anumber of prominent liberal and conservative groups and personalities inAmerican life. Two main factors emerged, one labeled liberal causes and theother labeled conservative causes.10 The resulting cumulative indexes basedon averaging the ratings of the groups and personalities contained within eachfactor produced a mean of 70 for liberal causes (alpha = .77) and 25 for con-servative causes (alpha = .79). In light of the political configuration and align-


ments accompanying the AIDS controversy, the expectation is that higherscores on the liberal causes index will prompt more activity while higherscores on the conservative causes index will depress activity.A final cluster of variables reflects the particular contextual properties asso-

ciated with AIDS. We argued earlier that a fuller understanding of variationsin specific domains requires measures specific to that domain. In particular,we refer to personal experiences and conditions. The guiding rationale is thatindividuals undergoing more intense, threatening, and defining experiencesassociated with AIDS will be motivated to participate more than will others.It is not enough to observe simply how much an individual cares about anissue, even though such an observation might prove to be a strong predictorof activity (Aldrich, 1997). Rather, we need to know what kinds of experiencesand transactions inspire varying levels of caring and concern. To that end wedeveloped five separate contextual indicators.One measure, growing distrust in health institutions, is based on a factor

analysis of retrospective reports of whether the respondents trust in a varietyof issue-relevant private and public institutions had increased, decreased, orremained the same since they (the respondents) had become personally awareof AIDS. An index derived from evaluations of insurance companies, drugcompanies, the United States health care system, and the presidency rangesfrom 0 (low distrust) to 2 (high distrust), with a high mean of 1.73 and analpha coefficient of .67. Because these institutions were seen as pivotal in thebattle against AIDS and were often assigned blame for the perceived lack ofprogress, elevated levels of distrust should engender a higher level of partici-pation among individuals with reasonably high levels of political efficacy(Gamson, 1968, ch. 8).A second contextual measure refers to reactions to a very public and critical

event in the AIDS battle. Probably the most significant demonstration stagedby ACT UP was a widely publicized protest held at the FDA headquarters inthe Washington DC area during the fall of 1988. For the movement in gen-eral, and for many AIDS activists in particular, the demonstration constituteda galvanizing, watershed event (Epstein, 1996, pp. 222228; Signorile, 1994,ch. 1). To assess the emotional impact of the event, the respondents indicatedhow personally meaningful it was to them: not at all (27%), a little (44%), orvery (29%).11 Considering the empowering interpretation applied to the event,those more personally affected should have higher participation scores.Four measures point toward personal loss and threat as a result of AIDS.

Other things being equal, individuals with longer histories associated withAIDS have had more opportunity to be active by sheer dint of elapsed time.One measure reflects the length of time AIDS has been personally meaningfulto the individual. Responses to the open-ended question, In what year didthe AIDS epidemic become personally meaningful to you? yielded a meanof 5.9 years. A follow-up question demonstrated that the term personally


meaningful meant, for nearly seven-tenths of the respondents, the death,AIDS diagnosis, or HIV+ status of partners, relatives, friends, or associates.Two other indicators of loss and threat are based on the respondents own

reported HIV status: dont know (16%), HIV negative (71%), and HIV positive(13%). Plausibly, the latter group should feel much more endangered thanthe first two; consequently we created one dummy variable indicating seropos-itivity (0 = not positive, 1 = positive). Doing so overlooks the possibility thatthe dont know group might feel less threatened than those who have ascer-tained their HIV status. Therefore, a second dummy variable was created,in which 0 represents those whose HIV status is unknown and 1 representsrespondents who know their HIV status.The final contextual indicator consists of the personal pain and loss occa-

sioned by the incidence of endangerment, suffering, and death of others towhom the individual is attached. Although the presence of personal loss anddanger is known to have prompted the emergence of leaders in several advo-cacy movements (MADD, Love Canal, and breast cancer), much less is knownas to whether the severity of pain and loss is related to activism at the rank-and-file level. Personal pain and loss can lead to demoralization and burnout(Holloway and Fullerton, 1994; Janoff-Bulman and Frieze, 1983; Malt, 1994).However, the subjects of this survey are already in the activist column. Thosewithout hope or energy presumably did not volunteer to work for the display.A reasonable assumption is that the greater the pain and loss among these self-selected activists, the more the individual cares about the issue. Our workinghypothesis, therefore, is that the degree of pain and loss serves as a spur togreater activism.The pain and loss measure is based on two questions ascertaining (a) the

number of people you are close to who have HIV/AIDS and (b) the numberof people you have been close to who have died from complications associ-ated with AIDS. Each of these questions contained four response options:01, 25, 610, and more than 10.12 Due to the high intercorrelation betweenthe answers to the two questions, the responses were summed to yield a 9-point pain and loss index running from 0 (low) to 8 (high) and having a meanof 4.4. The measure presumably references the intensity of the emotional andcognitive factors attending the personal sense of pain and loss due to theAIDS epidemic. It ups the degree of caring about. A fuller explication of thisindex is presented in a later section.

ACCOUNTING FOR ACTIVISM

The 16 variables just outlined were regressed against the activity index in astage-wise fashion to yield a partial and then a full model of activism. Model1, shown in the first column of Table 3, ignores the specific context of AIDS.13


TABLE 3. Two Models Predicting AIDS Activism (07)

Model 1 Model 2

b B b B

Social traitsAge (years) .003 .013 .025*** .120Income (010) .048** .059 .044** .055Education (04) .014* .043 .119*** .070Lesbian female (01) .482*** .073 .001 .000Straight female (01) .901*** .189 .217* .045Straight male (01) 1.589*** .145 .657** .059

Political engagementPolitical interest (03) .287*** .088 .268*** .083Political competence (04) .211*** .089 .129* .055

Ideological intensityLiberal causes (0100) .016*** .108 .011*** .077Conserv. causes (0100) .012*** .091 .008** .065

Contextual featuresIncurred pain and loss (08) .296*** .346FDA protests meaningful(02) .227*** .076Distrust organizations (02) .266* .042HIV status known (01) .071 .012HIV+ status (01) .051 .008Yrs. personally meaningful (1-14) .024 .015

Adj. R2 .16 .25N 2197 2046

Notes: b and B entries refer to unstandardized and standardized coefficients, respectively.Equations also include a control for DC area residence.

*p < .05; **p < .01; ***p < .001.

Aside from the special combinations of sex and sexual orientation dictated bythe nature of the sample and the issue, it is a basic model that contains manyof the same types of measures found in other studies of political participation.Two standard markers of social location, income and education, operated asexpected. Even within this activist, highly educated, and financially well-to-dogroup, these two characteristics exert their near universal connection to politi-cal action. In contrast, age appears to have little impact on the respondentsactivity levels.All three dummy variables representing the interaction of sex and sexual

orientation are statistically significant. Thus, gay men, the comparison group,have the highest activism scores. They are followed, in decreasing order, bylesbian women, straight women, and straight men.14 As anticipated, these find-ings indicate that AIDS activism is in part a function of both sex and sexualityand that the interaction between these two elements is complex.


Both of the political engagement indicators boost participation. What isperhaps most telling about political engagement is the general nature of thetwo measures used. Neither one contains any hint of the AIDS arena, thusdampening the likelihood of being seriously contaminated by the individualsAIDS activity score. Of course it is possible that increased activism has, overtime, elevated ones sense of political engagement, thus reversing the assumedcausal directionthough here we work in the customary vein of scholars pos-iting the likely temporal ordering (Verba et al., 1995, pp. 343348). Anotherpiece of evidence working against that possibility is that these engagementmeasures are also moderately related to activity levels in other issue domainsdrawing the attention of substantial numbers of AIDS activists.15

Each of the ideology measures affects activism. Even in this group, whichleans decidedly in the liberal direction, the strength of that tilting helps driveparticipation upward. Remarkably, negativity toward conservative causes isfully as powerful as positivity toward liberal causes. Presumed enemies werewell defined in the sometimes torrid battles over AIDS.Whereas the sorts of measures used in Model 1 could be applied in general

to activists in other issue arenas, the contextual variables added in Model 2 areunique to AIDS. Folding in these measures dramatically alters our findings.Importantly, the additional variables increase the explanatory power of themodel by nearly two-thirds. This result underscores the desirability of includ-ing domain-specific indicators when trying to account for variations in activ-ism. At least in the case of AIDS activists, we need to employ elements of thespecific context in which people are embedded, life experiences and condi-tions that propel individuals into the higher ranges of participation.Not all such experiences are of equal relevance, however. Easily the most

powerful contextual variable is the amount of pain and loss endured, as in-dexed by the death and HIV+ status of intimates. As indicated by the b coeffi-cient, a one-step increase on the 9-point pain and loss index produces, onaverage, a movement of nearly one-third of a point on the activity index. Atthe extremes, people with the highest levels of pain and loss record aroundthree more acts than do people with the lowest levels. Drawing rough compar-isons across variables, the standardized coefficient (beta weight) for pain andloss outruns by far that for any of the other predictors, and the t ratio (notshown) of 13.9 more than doubles that of the next nearest predictor. Espe-cially taking into account the number of other variables being held constant,pain and loss emerges as an extraordinary motivator of activity.16

The pain and loss measure is an imperfect but telling indicator of motiva-tions, of why people care about addressing the issue of AIDS. Determiningexactly what kinds of motivations are prompted by greater pain and loss liesbeyond the reach of this project, but several candidates seem likely. One isthe fear inspired by the direct threat of HIV. For gay men in particular thatwas a very personal fear as well as a fear for the gay community in general. For


virtually all activists it was a fear for the well-being of those closely attached tothempartners, sons, brothers, dear friends, and acquaintanceswho wereHIV+ or perceived to be at risk. A second likely motivation is the anger andfrustration arising from the toll being taken by AIDS. To many it seemed thatprogress in finding cures and treatment was proceeding at an excruciatinglyslow pace; the medical research establishment was heavily criticized (Epstein,1996). Then, too, anger and frustration sprang from the stigmatization of thegay community as it became identified with AIDS.A third motivation took the form of wanting to honor and memorialize those

who had already suffered or died. There were many ways to perform a memo-rial act, including contributing to the Quilt itself. Becoming more politicallyactive was a tangible, instrumental way of doing something in the name ofand as a tribute to others, especially close others. In sum, the severity of thepain and loss appears to induce a number of motivations that lead, in turn, toincreased participation.17

Other contextual factors associated with AIDS also affect participation lev-els. Admittedly, the FDA protests staged by ACT UP do not qualify as adefining moment in the same sense, say, as Stonewall did for the gay rightsmovement or the Greensboro lunch counter sit-in did for civil rights. Never-theless, the FDA actions have great symbolic meaning for the AIDS move-ment. At the individual level, among these activists, impressions of how per-sonally meaningful the protests were appear to provide a strong motivationalthrust. A subjective sense of elevated distrust of AIDS-related institutions alsodrives activity levels upward. Such an effect highlights the importance of uti-lizing trust measures that are connected to the issue content at hand. It alsoillustrates the virtue of having a dynamic component to a trust measure, inlight of the customary finding that static measures of general trust in thegovernment are generally poor predictors of participation at the national level(Rosenstone and Hansen, 1993, 150).Somewhat surprisingly, the two HIV status variables have no impact, a find-

ing that holds among gay men when analyzed separately. A general explana-tion for the lack of impact based on HIV status is that concern for the collec-tivityan other-regarding perspectivewas simply overwhelming morepersonal, self-oriented motivations. Ones own status fades in light of the fatebeing experienced by intimates, friends, and associates.Finally, how long AIDS has been personally meaningful has no impact on

levels of activism. Especially when weighed against the powerful effects of thepain and loss measure, the inconsequential nature of the temporal variableunderscores the importance of specifying the actual content of AIDS-relatedexperiences. It is the experiencing of certain emotions and cognitions thatprompts greater activity rather than just being more biographically available(McAdam, 1986) via longer exposure.Beyond demonstrating the importance of relevant contextual properties, the


full model in Table 2 also shows how these characteristics modify the explana-tory contribution of the social trait measures. One consequence is not only tomake age statistically significant but also to reverse the direction of its custom-ary impact. As age increases, activity rates decrease at a modest rate. A likelyexplanation for this reversal of the conventional pattern rests in the relativelyyouthful nature of the sample.Another consequence of introducing relevant life experiences into the equa-

tion is to alter substantially the place of the sex and sexual orientation com-binations. Whereas the basic model indicated quite strong influences, theelaborated model shows sharply reduced effects. Indeed, lesbian women areno longer distinguishable from the baseline group of gay men, and straightwomen are just barely so (t ratio of 1.98). Only straight men, numerically avery small portion of the sample, continue to be decidedly less active whencompared with gay men, and even in that instance, the unstandardized andstandardized coefficients declined by well over half. The blurring of effectsgenerated by the interaction of sex and sexual orientation in the full model isso singular that we address it as part of the following section.

A CLOSER LOOK AT PAIN AND LOSS

The powerful impact of life experiences, most especially that of pain andloss, bears closer scrutiny. We need to rule out the possibilities of spuriouseffects and a misordering of causal flows. Turning first to spurious results, thefact that sexual orientation virtually disappears as an adjusted predictor ofactivity levels requires explication. As might rightly be expected, the pain andloss index is also related to sexual orientation. Illustratively, nearly two-thirdsof the gay men scored in the top half of the pain and loss index comparedwith only around one-fourth of the straight men. The association of sexualorientation with both political activism and pain and loss suggests the possibil-ity that the pain and loss index is masking the effects of sexual orientation.Two findings argue very decidedly against this possibility. First, the relation-

ship between sexual orientation and pain and loss does not approach the levelsusually associated with severe masking effects, let alone problems of multi-colinearity. Lumping all gays (scored 1) into one category and all straights intoanother (0) produces a correlation (r) with the pain and loss index of but .30.Dividing the sample between gay men only (1) and all others (0) generates aneven lower correlation of .13. Pain and loss, then, is surely not a surrogate forsexual orientation, even though it is related to it.A second finding comes in the form of subgroup analysis. If pain and loss

simply stands in place of sexual orientation, it should not have much impact onparticipation within each of the four sexual orientation groups. Alternatively, ifpain and loss is a potent force in and of itself, it should have an impact across


all four groups. To evaluate these expectations, we regressed activity levelswithin the four sexual orientation groups against all the predictor variableslisted in Table 2. Doing so shows that pain and loss is the strongest predictorof activism across all sexual orientation groups, with beta (and b) coefficientsof .39 (33) for straight men, .37 (.32) for straight women, .34 (.31) for gaymen, and .22 (.19) for.18 These findings further strengthen the contention thatthe erosion of sexual orientations influence in the full model is not spurious.19

Although conflation with sexual orientation has been ruled out as an alterna-tive explanation for the apparent impact of personal pain and loss, anothercomplication arises. We have proposed that pain and loss affects participationvia the motivations created as a result of the emotional and cognitive re-sponses to personal losses. In this causal ordering, experiencing pain and lossclearly precedes activity. Contrarily, it could be argued that activity precedesor varies more or less simultaneously with the amount of pain and loss encoun-tered. More active people would be more likely to have more contact withpeople with AIDS or who are HIV+. Without being able to reconstruct indetail the sequencing of pain and loss on one hand, and activism on the other,this possibility cannot be rejected out of hand.Three elements work against such a possibility, however. One lies in the

necessary temporal ordering at work. Participating in the fight against AIDScould not have occurred before the disease manifested itself. Unlike suchtraditional venues as electoral behavior, for example, or ongoing causes suchas education and the environment, an unscheduled and unanticipated eventhad to occur prior to activity in the AIDS domain. General awareness of theepidemic undoubtedly propelled some activists, but it seems highly probablethat personal awareness in the form of sickness and death among friends andintimates would provide an even greater impulse. At the very least, the epi-demic would have had to be well beyond the initial stage if activity levels wereto be antecedent to pain and loss.A second element that casts doubt on a reverse influence flow stems from

a set of findings from the survey itself. It would be a fair presumption that asubstantial majority of the pain and loss events reported occurred before thecurrent year of the survey or were, in the case of seropositivity, continuationsof previous conditions. However, nine tenths of the respondents indicated thatthey had been politically active within the past 12 months. This does not meanthat they were inactive in previous years; indeed the great majority had un-doubtedly been active for 2 or more years. Still, the recency of activity istelling in that recent activity could not have prompted past levels of pain andloss.The activists self-appraisal of their activity levels provides a third piece of

evidence that supports the temporal precedence of pain and loss. When askedif they had become more politically active, less active, or had remained the


same since becoming personally aware of AIDS, approximately two-thirdsprofessed to having become more active. As noted earlier, the replies to afollow-up of the personally aware question revealed, quite poignantly, that theevent(s) usually involved some form of incurred pain and loss or the prospectthereof. Thus, when assessing whether their activity had increased since be-coming personally aware of AIDS, the respondents were reflecting, at a mini-mum, on the initial experiencing of pain and loss. At a maximum, their activitylevels represent an updating in response to further incurred losses. On bal-ance, then, the corollary evidence favors the proposition as originally set forth:more pain and loss drives more activity, rather than the reverse.

CONCLUSION

For all that is known about the forces influencing political participation ingeneral, systematic knowledge about participation among issue-specific activ-ists is scant by comparison. Our study of AIDS activists demonstrates howcrucial it is to include the contextual and personal features directly associatedwith caring about an issue in order to understand gradients in political activ-ism. Along with having been personally affected by the impact of AIDS, sev-eral traditional predictors of participation undoubtedly influenced the decisionof the Quilt display volunteers to become activists in the first place. They wereexceptionally well educated, financially well to do, politically engaged, andideologically intense. The heavy component of gay men was also a traditionalpredictor in the sense of representing a group with vested interests in theissue. Having served their function as part of the admission price to activism,these predictors had to then be reevaluated to reflect the impact of contextualand personal characteristics directly associated with AIDS.Had we limited our analysis to these more general markers of activism, we

would have misunderstood some key forces driving the respondents activism.Illustratively, a major and common sense finding would have been that gen-der and sexual orientation were key determinants of activism levels within thisgroup of AIDS activists. We would have concluded that gay men activistswere much more active than were other combinations of gender and sexualorientation, even when controlling for conducive personal characteristics.When AIDS-specific attributes were introduced into the analysis, however,gender and sexual orientation lost much of their punch as explanatory factors.More significantly, we demonstrated the power of contextual factors in

propelling participation levels. That issue-specific features play such a majorrole in accounting for activity levels suggests that such factors would performparallel roles in other health-related areas. We might expect, for example, thatintensity of pain and lossa potent contextual predictor of activity in theAIDS domainwould similarly distinguish among activists involved in collec-


tive efforts involving, for example, domestic violence, rape, drug and alcoholabuse, breast and lung cancer, toxic wastes, community violence, natural disas-ters, and gun control. Similarly, the motivation supplied by the salience oftransforming historical events, as with the FDA protests in the case of AIDSactivists, is most likely at work in other causes as well.We believe that the implications of our findings extend to other issue

domains. Other domains evoke different combinations of contextual featuresthat, in turn, can engender different sets of motivations. The forces animatingvarying levels of activism in such diverse areas as race relations, tax rates,abortion, gay rights, school curriculum, land use, the environment, militaryintervention, and pop culture may share some commonalties but they will alsodiffer in critical ways. Such factors as selective mobilization, relevant personalresources, and potential rewards are key determinants of why some peoplecross the participation threshold and others do not. These influences, espe-cially those dealing with personal resources, have been investigated in somedetail. Determinants based on an individuals relationship to the substantivecontent of an issue have been less well explored. Asserting that some peopleparticipate more (or participate at all!) because they care more begs the ques-tion of why they care more, what contextual features of their lives push themtoward caring more. Inferring their concern based on social location alonemay be incomplete or even misleading, as we just demonstrated in the caseof AIDS and sexual orientation. To take an example from another domain,inferring the degree and nature of concern about school affairs based simplyon parental status leaves much unsaid. It becomes necessary, then, to identifyissue-specific features that reflect both the nature and intensity of concernand caring. Doing so should lead to a more complete understanding of politi-cal activism.

Acknowledgments. Financial support for the research reported on here came fromthe Institute for Social Research and the Rackham School of Graduate Studies, Univer-sity of Michigan, and from the Academic Senate, University of California, Santa Bar-bara.

NOTES

1. Sturken (1997) describes the Quilts evolution, its place in the nations cultural memory, andcompares it with the Vietnam War Memorial.

2. The volunteers were solicited primarily through a mailing from the NAMES Project. Theorganization maintains a confidential mailing list of all people who have donated Quilt panels,volunteered at Quilt displays, and/or requested additional information about the Quilt. The1992 display was also advertised in gay and alternative media across the country and invitedprospective volunteers to contact the Project for more information.

3. A second possible source of bias can be deduced from the volunteers rapidity of survey


response. The quickest respondents (first one-third) were slightly more active on the partici-pation index that comprises the dependent variable in our analysis than were the slowerrespondents, with respective means of 4.2 and 3.9 out of a possible score of 7. If the scoresof nonrespondents followed in the wake of late respondents, which is a frequent assumption,the obtained sample may modestly overestimate the activity levels of all preregistrants as wellas the factors that contribute to higher levels of activism.

4. Nevertheless, preregistrants from the local DC area did not report lower incomes than pre-registrants coming from longer distances.

5. Cohen (1999, ch. 4) argues, however, that a parallel and largely unrecognized occurrence ofAIDS, even at the early stages of the epidemic, was present among intravenous drug users,at least in the New York City area.

6. The lead-in question to the battery ran as follows: From the following list, please indicateany political cause(s) you may have been involved in the past and the types of activity thatdescribe your involvement. (Circle as many numbers as applicable.) Issues included, in thisorder, abortion rights, AIDS, anti-war/peace, child care, civil rights, crime/neighborhoodwatch, education, environment, gay/lesbian rights, health care, political candidate, supportour troops, taxes, welfare rights, and womens rights.

7. Strictly speaking, the age relationship is frequently curvilinear rather than linear, with activitydropping off in the very upper ranges, a range virtually empty in this sample.

8. Issue domain can make a very substantial difference, however, as witness the cases of abortionrights and education (Verba et al., 1995, ch. 8).

9. The statements were as follows: (1) I feel I have a pretty good understanding of the impor-tant political issues facing our country. (2) I consider myself well-qualified to participate inpolitics. (3) I feel that I could do as good a job in public office as most other people. (4)I think I am better informed about politics and government than most people.

10. The liberal cause factor included environmentalists, the womens movement, civil rights lead-ers, people on welfare, and liberals; the conservative cause factor included George Bush,Republicans, the military, and conservatives. All factor analyses utilized in this article em-ployed principal components followed by an orthogonal rotation of the axes (varimax method).Simple additive indexes were formed from the equally weighted items loading on the variousfactors. Only items with loadings of at least .50 were included in any such indexes.

11. This stimulus was one among 17 historical events and movements dating from World War IIonward that were included on a list.

12. Precise estimates would have been preferable to ranges, especially for purposes of the regres-sion analysis to be employed. However, pretest results indicated serious respondent difficul-ties in supplying specific numbers.

13. Both models also include a dummy variable (not shown) representing whether the respon-dents were from the DC area. This variable has no theoretical relevance for the dependentvariable but is included in order to control for the overrepresentation of DC area respondentsdue to their proximity to the display, and hence the reduced opportunity costs of being apreregistrant. We have also run separate regressions for the DC area and non-DC area re-spondents. Not surprisingly, the precise coefficients differ. However, our main contentionabout the importance of domain-specific contextual features is supported, as reported in note16.

14. In absolute terms, the unadjusted scores on the activity index were 4.6 for gay men, 4.1 forlesbian women, 3.4 for straight women, and 2.8 for straight men.

15. The bivariate (r) correlation between competence and the AIDS activity index was .20. Com-parable correlations with other issue activity indexes were .20 for abortion, a more or lesscontemporaneous issue; .21 for civil rights, an issue that clearly peaked well before AIDS;.17 for anti-war/peace, an episodic movement, and perhaps most significantly, .28 for politicalcandidates, a long-term venue of activity.


16. The pain and loss measure remains preeminent if, instead of statistically controlling for DCarea residence in the model, we instead run separate regressions according to residence. Theb and beta coefficients for the non-DC area subset are .31 and .35, respectively; the corre-sponding figures for the DC area subset are .27 and.31.

17. See Kayal (1993, chs. 810) for a detailed analysis of what motivated volunteerism amonggay men in New York City.

18. These relationships are significant at the .001 level for gay men and straight women and atthe .01 level for straight men and lesbian women.

19. As we noted previously, the racial homogeneity of the preregistrants precludes sustainedanalysis by race. Bearing in mind the relatively small number of cases (n = 262) and mostespecially the heterogeneity of the nonwhite subsample, we found that pain and loss alsoserves as a predictor of activism among the nonwhites as well, albeit at the p < .10 level.

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