Scholarship on electoral turnout has long emphasized two main themes: explanations of nonvoting in terms of individual characteristics and in terms of contextual variables. These investigations have deeply enriched our understanding of electoral participation, but their limitations have also sensitized us to the remaining problems of explanation. Perusal of the work on American politics exposes a rather striking tendency in studies of participation to ignore, or soft pedal, the effects of active political mobilization. In this article we formulate two models of electoral turnout—socioeconomic and political mobilization—and apply them to aggregate data on voting in gubernatorial elections of 1978 and 1980. The socioeconomic model of turnout includes such influences as income, age, and educational attainment. To assess the effects of political mobilization, we have considered campaign spending, partisan competition, electoral margin, and the presence or absence of a simultaneous race for the United States Senate. Both of the models perform quite well individually, producing significant and meaningful coefficients and adequate fits. Yet in the final analysis we demonstrate that quite apart from major sources of variation in gubernatorial turnout—such as region and presidential versus nonpresidential years—the mobilizing influences of campaign activism and competitiveness have a strong impact on electoral participation; electoral law, i.e., closing date of registration, retains a small but significant effect on voting for governor; and socioeconomic characteristics, included in a fully specified model, have little to contribute independently to an explanation of electoral turnout. These findings are very much in the same vein as related cross-national investigations, which emphasize the crucial role of electoral law and political parties and downplay individual characteristics as determinants of electoral participation. On the basis of the research reported here, we argue that scholars need to pay more attention to political mobilization as an explanation of electoral turnout.

Americans' feelings about the performance of Congress range across the spectrum from positive to negative, but tend to be negative. What accounts for supportive or unsupportive orientations toward Congress? The effects of personal attributes like socioeconomic status, or beliefs about the efficacy of congressional processes, account for only part of citizens' evaluations of Congress. We argue that discrepancies between what people expect Congress to be like and what they perceive it actually is like independently affect evaluations of Congress. We measure this "expectation-perception discrepancy" and demonstrate in a multivariate explanatory environment that this discrepancy affects the extent of Americans' favorableness toward Congress, drawing upon data gathered in a 1994 postelection survey (N = 808) conducted in Ohio by the Polimetrics Laboratory for Social and Political Research at Ohio State University. Our argument is elementary. Citizens carry with them expectations, however rudimentary, about political institutions, Congress in particular, and about processes taking place within Congress. Such expectations may develop in the form of fuzzy images of the institution as a whole, arise from very partisan or ideological perspectives, biases, and distortions, focus on particular institutional actions or events, or concern the characteristics or attributes of the institution's members. Citizens' expectations about Congress may develop from specific socialization, perhaps in early life experience, about what Congress should be like. Civics textbook expectations about Congress's constitutional function, its members and their conduct, its representativeness, its accessibility, or its reliability in passing legislation may shape citizens' expectations, forming an image or "prototype" of the congressional ideal. Citizens' perceptions of the congressional reality-what they think Congress

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