Students of democratic politics have long been concerned with the role of political participation in linking government and the people it serves. Whereas participation is generally defined in terms of voting, this article defines participation as the communication of citizen preferences to public officeholders. We show that aggregate sentencing decisions of California superior courts changed to reflect more closely prevailing public opinion after a large percentage of the populace expressed their preferences on a marijuana issue. The fact that members of California superior courts are seemingly immune from any effective electoral sanction serves both to underline the importance of this form of participation to a responsive system of government and to caution against conceiving of the participation-responsiveness relationship only in terms of punitive electoral devices.

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j n The Unheavenly City Revisited, perhaps the most ' provocative recent commentary on urban America, Banfield (1974) conceptualizes social class as a &dquo;psychological orientation toward the future.&dquo; Banfield purports to build upon traditional social stratification theory in advancing the &dquo;heuristic hypothesis&dquo; that cultural differences among social classes are a function of different time horizons of members of such classes. Because it suggests that specific political traits are associated with time-horizon classes in a way not revealed by indicators of socioeconomic status, the concept has important implications for both public policy and social stratification theory.. BANFIELD'S CLASS CONCEPTAND ITS IMPLICATIONS Banfield (1974: 52-76) argues that individuals occupy positions on a class continuum according to their degree of future orientation. At one extreme, lower-class individuals are unwilling or unable to visualize the future and instead seek immediate gratification of needs and wants. The greater one's

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