Standard participation measures may only capture groups that already self-label talk political

Evidence

I suggest that what Verba and Nie really found was that the link between membership and political involvement held only for people who defined some of their group’s conversation as ”political.” … Researchers like Verba and Nie examine easy-to-measure forms of involvement like voting and contacting officials; their establishing these measures is like the drunk who lost his hat and searches under a streetlight two blocks away from where he lost it, because that’s where the light is. — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics, 1888

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does the Verba/Nie result, properly re-read, suggest political participation research is circular — finding involvement only where people already call it that?
• corroborated: 4 independent passages support this claim — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 1888