IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/apsrev/v64y1970i02p491-507_12.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Forms of Representation: Participation of the Poor in the Community Action Program

Author

Listed:
  • Peterson, Paul E.

Abstract

Debate over representation has been a continuing part of the Western political tradition at least since the writings of Hobbes. Recently, Hanna Pitkin, using the tools of linguistic analysis, has clarified, if not resolved, the debate by examining the disparate uses of the term in both political and non-political discourse. In order to elucidate the issues, she discussed such different forms of representation as formal representation, descriptive representation, substantive representation and interest representation. In this paper I will utilize the distinctions she has developed as a framework for analyzing the process of representation within the community action program of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) during its initial formative period (1964-1966) in the cities of Chicago, Philadelphia and New York City.I will argue that 1) the manner of selecting representatives of the poor (formal representation) was a function of the political resources of competing interests in the city; 2) the orientations (interest representativeness) of the formal representatives affected their influence (actual representation); 3) the influence (actual representation) of the formal representatives affected the level of intra-neighborhood conflict, which in turn affected the representatives' orientations (interest representation); 4) the character of the actual and interest representation was affected by the type of formal representation; and 5) the social characteristics of the representatives (descriptive representation) influenced the character of actual and interest representation.

Suggested Citation

  • Peterson, Paul E., 1970. "Forms of Representation: Participation of the Poor in the Community Action Program," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 64(2), pages 491-507, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:cup:apsrev:v:64:y:1970:i:02:p:491-507_12
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0003055400129661/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Pettijohn Sarah L. & Boris Elizabeth T., 2018. "Testing Nonprofit State Culture: Its Impact on the Health of the Nonprofit Sector," Nonprofit Policy Forum, De Gruyter, vol. 9(3), pages 1-13, October.
    2. Aaron A Moore & R Michael McGregor, 2021. "The representativeness of neighbourhood associations in Toronto and Vancouver," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 58(13), pages 2782-2797, October.
    3. Brad Wright, 2015. "Voices of the Vulnerable: Community health centres and the promise and peril of consumer governance," Public Management Review, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 17(1), pages 57-71, January.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:apsrev:v:64:y:1970:i:02:p:491-507_12. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/psr .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.