Can You Sing Your Way to Good Citizenship?: Recreational Association Structures and Member Political Participation

What is the relationship of recreational associations to the political engagement of their members? We answer this question using multilevel data on 25 community choirs and the 1,032 members within them. Using structural equation modelling, we model the relationships between recreational association structures and member political participation through member experiences along with countervailing selection effects. We find that selection dynamics are the primary driver of the relationship between recreational associations and member political activity. We also find some evidence that associations foster new political activity in members through an interpretive mechanism—but not through developmental mechanisms. Recreational associations with more-participatory structures and broader organizational identities lead some members to interpret their recreational activity as publicly-oriented. Adopting publicly-oriented interpretations is related to certain kinds of new political activity. The results suggest that, overall, recreational associations are having little impact on political participation; when they do, they do so not by teaching participants how to do civic work but by altering how members think about civic life.