"Street-Level" Bureaucracy and Political Support

Abstract

Failure of Mexican Americans to integrate and attach themselves to American political and social life is often attributed to bad personal experiences with political authorities. In this paper, levels of contact and satisfaction with several agencies of government are correlated with measures of political participation, political efficacy, representiveness of different levels of government, and impact of different levels of living conditions among a sample of Mexican Americans in Omaha, Nebraska. Little evidence for the proposition is found. While contact with public authorities among Mexican Americans is low, satisfac tion is high. Satisfaction is not, however, correlated with the different dimensions of support. The system performance-system support hypothesis is obviously conditional, varying from one situation to another.