“Social Structure, Social Context and Partisan Mobilization: Urban Workers in Chile.”

[http://cps.sagepub.com/content/8/3/318.extract Langton, Kenneth P., and Ronald Rapoport. 1975. “Social Structure, Social Context and Partisan Mobilization: Urban Workers in Chile.” Comparative Political Studies 8: 318-44.]

Overview
Theory of contextual effect: Social structure affects political behavior when: Results: Chilean workers are most likely to vote socialist when:
 * Person identitifies with a conscious groupLangton.png
 * Person links political leaders to interests of consciousness
 * they are defined as industry workers
 * they live in industry neighborhoods
 * when they subjectively identify self with conscious class

How a party mobilizes a class

Class consciousness develops when workers encounter and interact with other workers who relate to them, and such interaction leads to a realization of collective conditions and interests. Class consciousness will influence political thinking of individual members if they are able to link their counsciousness to a particular party. A party facilitates this linkage through exposing workers to propoganda. This propoganda will enter the consciousness only if enough members realize and change the consciousness as a whole to incorporate the socialist party as the political extension of the consciousness. If the workers are exposed in a context of a worker neighborhood, they can more easily link the class to the party.

Place in Literatire
Large body of scholarship from 1960s did not show working class giving support to the left. Langton and Rapport show that a class is a contextual effect when properly defining and measuring an individuals context. Working class assuming exploitation by industry; so it's innapropriate to conflate an industry worker with a low wage non-industry worker.

When explaining the process of political mobilization of a class, they glosses over huge pyschological aspects of mobilization. Particularly, the process of propoganda and linkage is more fully explained by sholarship in group politics and mass communications.