This Doctoral Dissertation Support award is undergirded by William Julius Wilson's concentration of poverty thesis. The primary purpose of the analysis is to examine the political consequences of living in extreme poverty communities. The model for the investigation incorporates explanatory factors from both the urban underclass and political participation literatures. The exogenous variables are neighborhood context and family context, while the endogenous variables are socio-economic status, political orientation and political behavior. The data used to test the model will come from a survey of 400 Black residents in extreme povery and low poverty neighborhoods in Columbus, Ohio. The data will be collected through telephone interviewing by Polimetrics Laboratory at the Ohio State University. The significance of the research rests on its attempts to assess the extent to which underclass or extreme poverty neighborhoods and impaired family contexts, have debilitating influences on the political orientations and behavior of residents. Studies of the political consequences of living in concentrated poverty communities are crucial to the understanding of the effects of poverty on political democracy.
