The Organization of Political Space and Citizen Responses to Dissatisfaction in Urban Communities: An Integrative Model

For more than three decades, the “spatial dimensions of urbanism” have provided an important theoretical tool for studying urban government and politics. Unfortunately, the now rather voluminous literature on the subject remains “painfully eclectic” (Goodman, 1977, p. 245). This is especially true in the refining of various propositions concerning the linkages between jurisdictional boundaries and individual attitudes and behaviors associated with political participation. Specifically, two problems confront the literature. First, there is a lack of an integrated model that encompasses the full range of behavioral and attitudinal responses to dissatisfaction with urban politics and accounts for the individual's choice from among those alternative response patterns. Second, the literature only incompletely and inappropriately addresses the impact of correspondence or lack thereof between spatial contours of social worlds and political jurisdictions on modes of political participation. This essay addresses these problems by developing a model of citizen response to dissatisfaction based on recent theoretical elaboration of Hirschman's (1970) work and applying that model to the analysis of the impact of correspondence-noncorrespondence on participation.