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This paper argues that out of the ?service learning? movement of the 1980s, a new form of scholarship is emerging known as the ?scholarship of engagement.? Engaged scholarship has two core components which are not fully captured by the concept of service learning: first, it includes other scholarly functions beyond teaching, including research; and second, it focuses on genuinely reciprocal collaboration with communities. This paper defines the scholarship of engagement, creates a taxonomy five forms of engaged scholarship, and documents practices associated with this movement. Informed by a problem-driven, pluralistic approach to engaged scholarship, this taxonomy suggests that the new forms of engaged scholarship each have important contributions to the civic renewal of American higher education, and together make up an exciting and growing movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the United States is commonly thought to be long on power (e.g., political, economic, cultural, technological, etc.), its citizens remain short on the competencies (i.e., knowledge, skills, and attitudes) needed to be responsible and effective members of a global community. Taking this paradox of global competency and power as my starting point, this paper examines one unique effort to use online technology and an interdisciplinary pedagogical approach to educate young people for global citizenship. Specifically, this paper presents ?The Global Challenge,? a three-credit hour interdisciplinary course on global issues required since Fall 2001 of all freshmen at Fairleigh Dickinson University. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a widely held argument that civic engagement and political participation reinforce each other, which remains to be empirically vindicated, especially in the context of developing societies. Using survey data from Kathmandu, this paper examines the structural relationships between civic engagement, electoral participation, and other forms of political participation and finds that civic engagement contributes to other forms of political participation, which in turn affects electoral participation. In process, this paper identifies the extent of civic engagement, electoral participation, and other forms of political participation and their characteristics, with important policy implications on maximizing electoral participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional theories of civil society have claimed that victory in major wars should stimulate a rise in civic engagement following wars, while defeat should quench it. Recent research, however, reveals that civic engagement appears to rise in defeated societies as well. What are some alternative hypotheses for the evolution of civic engagement following major wars? This paper contends that as a first step towards reformulating theories on the impact of war on civil society, a fuller understanding of the broad social changes that war brings about is necessary. To this end, it reviews the large social-scientific literature on the social impact of war, focusing especially on insights from sociological, psychological, and psychiatric research. On the basis of the reviews, it argues that the process of war appears to influence the postwar evolution of civil society at least as much as outcomes. The paper concludes by identifying some promising avenues for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents the findings from a study of students’ ‘lived experiences’ in the political science course ‘Democracy and Education’ and practicum ‘Coaching Public Achievement.’ The study uses qualitative methods to better analyze the complexities of students’ experiences and the learning that occurs through experience. This paper has two distinct goals. The first goal is to describe course and practicum as well as a potential model for instructors who wish to incorporate similar pedagogies and practical experiences into their courses. The second goal is to understand the nature of students’ experiences, what these experiences mean, how they learn through experience, and whether this course fosters political engagement. Based on narratives from in-depth interviews and student journals, this interpretive study aims at what Geertz (1971) calls thick description. While not a causal analysis, the study seeks to document learning and personal change through the critical analysis of detailed narratives. I highlight how students indeed have profound learning experiences in the course and practicum. The experience ‘de-centers’ students, provoking reflexive thought about their role in the program, young people and the nature of political action. Many describe how they have learned important inter-personal and political skills which they ‘tried out’ in other domains of their lives. However, while some students offer stories of personal change, it is unclear at this point they are more politically engaged as a result of the course. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research has shown that churches may play important roles in promoting civic participation among their members. But churches and similar local worship communities differ markedly in the degree to which they do so. Drawing on a recently completed study of the role of churches, mosques, temples, and other worship communities in the social and civic incorporation of recent immigrants, this paper presents an approach to understanding what worship communities might do to promote civic participation and how they differ among themselves in doing so. The paper identifies three dimensions of support for civic participation: social capital, associations as civic actors, and associations as sites of training in civic skills and mobilization for civic action. The paper also develops a model for understanding how and why local worship communities serving immigrants vary along these dimensions, focusing on the circumstances of immigration, the type of ‘institutional culture’ of the worship community, and the religious tradition it draws upon. We present data from our survey of Washington, D.C. area churches, mosques, temples, and other worship communities to illustrate the sorts of differences that emerge along each one of our three dimensions and demonstrate the utility of the explanatory model developed here. The paper ends with reflections on how this approach might be applied to the question of the role of local worship communities more generally in promoting civic participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper criticizes both an apolitical and a hyperpolitical account of professional expertise and authority in order to gain a better understanding of the democratic responsibilities of professions. Social trustee professionalism, the apolitical view, holds that in addition to task competence and fiduciary responsibility to particular clients, professionals are to serve public interests in central social ends, such as justice and health. By contrast, the anti-technocratic critique, the hyperpolitical view, sees professions as impediments to democratic expression of public interests because of their structural position between lay public and elected officials, and because of their prescriptive powers. Though the anti-technocratic critique is right to hold professions accountable for their effects on democracy, this paper argues that an adequate democratic theory of professional responsibility must recognize the ways professionals can enable democracy by encouraging lay participation in professional domains. The paper concludes with a suggestion for reconstructing professional roles to show how expertise and skill-based authority can interact favorably with lay participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses data gathered in the 2001 British Election Study to investigate the determinants of turnout in general elections. The analyses focus on the explanatory power of a variant of a modified rational choice model which has stimulated protracted debate among students of voting behaviour. The paper also considers two versions of the much discussed ?heartlands hypothesis? which has been offered to explain the unprecedented drop in turnout in the 2001 general election. Analyses indicate that all three variables in the modified rational choice model have strong and statistically significant effects. Although sense of civic duty is predictably powerful, turnout also is affected by expected benefits and perceived costs of voting. Analyses do not support a ?Downsian? version of the heartlands hypothesis that blames low turnout on New Labour’s abandonment of traditional Labour policy and ideological positions. A ‘stokesian? version of the hypothesis that attributes effects to government performance dissatisfaction among Labour’s heartlands supports fares better. The paper concludes by considering the implications of major findings for future trends in electoral participation in Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines why people ?violate? rationality and take part in their communities, differentiating by types of participation, particularly political versus other, more communal, types of participation. We argue that trust plays an important role in participation levels, but contrary to more traditional models, the causal relationship runs from trust to participation. In addition, we posit that trust is strongly affected by economic inequality. Using aggregated American state level data for the 1970s, 80s and 90s, we present a series of two-stage least-squares models on the effects of inequality and trust on participation, controlling for other related factors. Findings indicate that inequality is the strongest determinant of trust, and that trust has a greater effect on communal participation than on political participation. Check author’s web site for an updated version of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Synopsis: There is widespread concern about declining levels of conventional political participation, exemplified by electoral turnout and party membership, as well as eroding engagement through civic associations such as churches and unions. But there are many reasons why this focus may have overlooked some important ways that modes of political activism have been reinvented in recent decades. This paper argues that traditional theoretical and conceptual frameworks derived from the literature on participation in the 1960s and 1970s, and even the core concepts, need to be revised and updated to take account of how opportunities for political activism have evolved and diversified in the late twentieth century. Part I of this study theorizes about shifts in the nature of political activism in terms of the agencies (collective organizations), repertoires (the actions commonly used for political expression), and targets (the political actors that participants seek to influence). Part II examines cross-national evidence for the rise of protest politics, the characteristics of those engaged in protest, and whether there is considerable overlap today between conventional and protest modes. Part III focuses upon environmental activists, taken as exemplifying participation via new social movements, to see whether these participants are particularly attracted towards protest politics. The conclusion considers the implications for understanding trends in civic engagement and for the future of representative democracy. Check author’s web site for an updated version of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of the IEA Civic Education Study has been to examine in a comparative framework the political socialization of adolescents as they prepare to undertake their roles as citizens in democracies. Approximately 90,000 students from the modal grade for 14-year-olds from nationally representative samples in twenty-eight countries were tested during 1999. This paper focuses on the predictors of four different types of political engagement: electoral, partisan, volunteer, and protest. The potentially influential factors to be examined are knowledge of democracy and skills in interpreting information, sense of trust in government related institutions, several aspects of the schools (perceptions of curriculum, sense of efficacy developed in the school culture, perceived encouragement of discussion in the classroom, and current participation in organizations). The countries included in this presentation include Australia, England, Greece, Norway, and the United States. The theoretical base for the paper is Wenger’s work on communities of practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I draw the link between three developments in advanced Western democracies: the decline in voter turnout, the decline in political knowledge and attention to politics, and the depoliticization of youth. After summarizing what we know of these phenomena, I then, using both comparative and Canadian data in particular, investigate the extent to which the first two can be understood as outcomes of third. If, as I try to show, this is significantly the case, it places challenges on policy makers and political scientists alike, challenges I address in the conclusion of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the post transition period of the 1990s, political parties have lost some of their dominance, the state has shrunk and new forms of civic organizations have come into being. This paper uses the 1997 World Value survey to analyze how these changes have shaped the relationship between political party membership and civic organizational membership in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay. While some politicians have feared the rise of civil society, this paper shows that there continues to be a strong link between civic organizational membership and party membership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper undertakes an empirical examination and theoretical analysis of President Bush?s USA Freedom Corps?a citizen service initiative created after 9/11 to harness the American people?s spirit of shared sacrifice and ?promote a culture of responsibility, service, and citizenship.? This case-study is analyzed from three distinct perspectives?civic engagement, public policy, and the modern presidency?to consider larger questions that it raises about contemporary American politics. The key controversies that define these larger questions concern philosophical arguments about the obligations of citizenship and the value of citizen service; public policy-based arguments regarding the means by which social problems can be addressed most efficiently and effectively; political/ideological arguments about the nature of the relationship between government and civil society; and institutional arguments concerning the influence and capacity of the executive branch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relying on exploratory research from a foundation-funded, applied study of low income neighborhoods, this paper considers the electoral participation of poor blacks who live in perhaps the most ?truly disadvantaged? neighborhoods in the United States?urban public housing residents. It reports that black public housing residents participate at modest levels in electoral politics as voters. Additionally, it explores how the low participation of black public housing residents in formal civic life, especially churches and associations, may affect their rate and frequency of voting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Civilians are supposed to enjoy immunity during warfare. They don?t, of course, and they are especially vulnerable to nuclear weapons and acts of terrorism. This is probably the reason that the public has sometimes mobilized around issues related to these two types of killing. Even though they have posed little threat to Americans, there is another device which has also claimed more civilian than military lives: landmines. This paper tells the story of the formulation and passage of the Mine Ban Treaty which was signed in 1997 and became law in 1999. Its five year review will be held later this year in Nairobi. In general, disarmament negotiations between nations have been minimally successful. The case of the Mine Ban Treaty is remarkable for the speed with which it became law, for the way it came into being, and for the vigorous efforts to implement it. It is the product of work by hundreds of nongovernmental organizations, by nations who are not members of the United Nations Security Council, and by a process outside the usual diplomatic channels. The Treaty and the beginning of its implementation have increased security for thousands of people around the globe. It is an example of political effectiveness by what might be called global civic society and of increasing security by disarming rather than arming. The International Campaign for the Ban on Landmines was led by Nobel Peace Prize Winner Jody Williams and many of the Campaign?s other leaders were women, although it was not a ?women?s? campaign. Nevertheless, Williams fits the pattern of most other women who have won the Nobel Peace Prize. Only one, Alva Myrdal, who wrote a book to deplore the ineffectiveness of the United Nations disarmament machinery, followed established procedures or participated in established organizations. All the other women winners were innovative and initiating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Civic environmentalism is gaining popularity as a model of second generation environmental policy. With its focus on civic engagement, market-based tools, and private-public partnerships, civic environmentalism has enjoyed some successes at the local, state, and regional levels. Yet, the question remains: Does civic environmentalism work when applied to more complex, large scale environmental problems? This paper applies the civic environmentalism model of environmental governance to the Mississippi River/Gulf of Mexico Task Force?s efforts to control the ?dead zone? located off the coast of Louisiana. I find that civic environmentalism does have its limits when applied to large geographic areas and temporally complex environmental problems. A lack of government funding and various barriers to collective action also play a role. In the end analysis, policy makers must be leery about relying too much on voluntary programs and the tyranny of individual decisions when dealing with the Gulf of Mexico?s dead zone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Institutions of higher education purport to prepare students for international understanding and for engaged citizenship. Students are increasingly thrust into international contexts and expected to intellectually and socially navigate relationships that span traditional state borders. Simultaneously, universities have ramped up institutional commitment to service-learning and community-based scholarship. These two trends are brought together through the development of Intercultural Service-Learning Courses at the Amizade Global Service-Learning Center at the University of Pittsburgh. Quantitative and qualitative reviews of student outcomes for 2003 Amizade Center courses suggested students were moved to action through their experiences integrating academics and service in foreign communities, but they had little understanding of how to enact their newfound intensity. The disjuncture between rootless secular ethical principles of global citizenship and students’ ability to enact those tendencies in a meaningful way led the staff and faculty of the Amizade Center to develop new curriculum that integrates applicable discussion of global citizenship into the course experiences. The curriculum includes traditional academics, reflection, service through community partnership, intercultural immersion and exchange, and exploration of global citizenship. Over 100 students on courses in diverse disciplines in various settings around the world were exposed to this curriculum during the summer of 2004. This paper quantitatively and qualitatively assesses the impact of a particular methodological and curricular approach of intercultural service-learning on students’ understanding of and ability to apply global citizenship. It will clarify the effects of one institutional approach for integrating the university goals of developing citizens and encouraging international awareness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on comparisons between Spain and Portugal, this paper emphasizes enduring legacies of Portugal’s revolutionary transition to democracy. Successes in employment and in the quality of democarcy are emphasized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many studies show persistently low or declining levels of political interest and involvement among young Americans, including college students and recent graduates. But there is almost no large-scale research on what kinds of experiences and processes can help promote greater high-quality political participation across a diverse range of undergraduates, including those from groups that tend to participate less, and little is known about whether educational interventions can be effective. There remains pressing need for study of specific practices that show promise for addressing political disengagement (American Political Science Association, 1999). We need to better understand and measure political interest and behavior in a diverse range of undergraduates, as well as to better understand and measure some of the processes and practices that can promote responsible democratic citizenship across the full spectrum of students. This set of problems animates the Political Engagement Project, the first large-scale effort to study the influence of political engagement interventions on college students. The Project is a multi-dimensional study of political engagement in more than 1000 college students from more than sixty American campuses participating in twenty-one different course and program interventions that include a focus on promoting democratic involvement. Part I of this paper explains the general theoretical scaffold of the project, Part II explains the conceptual and measurement frameworks for the survey, and Part III shares the first set of results from innovative pre-/post- surveys used in the Project. In the preliminary set of findings shared in Part III, paired-sample t-tests show significant increases in many key dimensions of political engagement among an initial matched sample of 384 students participating in eighteen different courses and program interventions. These results suggest that although there is much variation across interventions and across students, carefully-designed college courses and programs can have significant effects on all four constituent elements of political engagement, including political knowledge, values, skills, and behaviors. Significant increases occurred in many critical factors of political engagement, including a politically engaged identity, or one?s sense of self as person who is concerned about political issues and government policies and is politically involved; internal and external political efficacy, or the belief that what one thinks and does politically matters and that the political system is at least somewhat open to change; the set of analytic, communication, deliberation, leadership, and political action skills that support effective involvement in diverse political arenas; and a range of actual political behaviors and future commitments to political action. Our initial data analysis also provides baseline information about the nature of students? learning experiences in these courses and programs, and suggests relationships between specific teaching approaches and practices and students? political development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Income inequality in the United States has been growing significantly over the past several decades. Considering that social capital has been on the decline while income inequality has been on the rise, scholars have become curious about a potential connection between these two trends. Preliminary studies reveal that income inequality predicts social trust and civic group involvement using a variety of methodological approaches. Still, from these studies, it is difficult to tell exactly how income inequality shapes the character of civic group involvement and social ties in US communities. Traditional measures of social capital, used by most scholars, have trouble differentiating between social ties that reinforce (bond) or cut across (bridge) narrow group interests. Because income inequality encourages fragmentation and polarization in communities, it is important to differentiate between bridging and bonding social capital for an accurate assessment of the impact of economic stratification. This project analyzes a cross-sectional, quasi-experimental survey of two rural Minnesota communities, Grand Rapids and Detroit Lakes. Results from this paper are based on (1) a survey of citizens and (2) a survey of civic organizations conducted in the two communities. These two cities are demographically similar and have the same mean income levels, but differ in terms of how equally the income is distributed. Findings suggest that income inequality seems to be much more harmful to bridging social ties than bonding social ties. Citizens and organizations in Grand Rapids (lower in income inequality) are associated with diverse groups and ideas and are well connected to the broader community. Citizens and organizations in Detroit Lakes (higher in income inequality) are, by comparison, more insular and isolated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What can de facto segregated, urban schools do to help the overwhelmingly poor and minority students who attend them become civically engaged and politically empowered? To what extent does an effective civic education in these schools need to take into account these students? life experiences, readings of history, and interpretation of current events? If these do turn out to be significant, what does this imply about the construction of American citizenship more generally? These are the questions that motivate this essay. After providing anecdotal motivation from my own eighth grade classroom for the above questions, I give more formal data in section 1 to show why we should be concerned about civic engagement among young people living in de facto segregated, poor, minority, and immigrant communities. I define the characteristics of good citizenship and argue that there is a ?civic achievement gap? between citizens who are poor, minority, and immigrants, on the one hand, and middle-class, white, and native-born citizens on the other. I then demonstrate in section 2 why de facto segregated schools are both necessary and opportune as sites to address and attempt to remediate the civic achievement gap. In section 3, I focus on curricular reform within history and social studies as one means of narrowing the attitudinal civic achievement gap in particular. I argue that de facto segregated schools and communities should help students construct empowering civic narratives that are grounded in and responsive to their own lived experiences. Section 4 gives two examples of such civic narratives?one based in African Americans? struggle for justice and equality, and the other based in younger generations? obligations attendant on their ancestors? history of sacrifice. This means that both civic education in particular, and conceptions of American citizenship more broadly, must become personalized and particularized: a move that contradicts current taste for standardization and uniformity, and a problem that I address briefly in section 5 at the end of this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper asks how organizations for girls construct the relationship between girls and the public sphere. Drawing upon document research and two intensive case studies, one at a Girl Scout camp and the other at a community based organization, I argue that there are two primary types of girls? organization: normative and transformative. Normative organizations, such as the Girl Scouts, rely upon a psychological understanding of the problems facing girls and avoid issues of race and class differences amongst girls. They imagine the public as a space of threat that girls must be protected from and full of barriers that girls must learn to overcome. When they do involve girls in their communities, it is only in the form of service. Transformative organizations engage girls in a more sociological analysis of the conditions of their lives, including analyses of the intersections of race, class and gender. They also believe that girls can and should have public authority and voice and encourage girls? involvement in a wide range of social change projects and political activities. Given growing social concern with youth civic engagement, this paper highlights these two models divergent implications for girls? public and political identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concepts of social and cultural capital are heuristic for understanding civic participation in urban U.S. communities as these theories help determine how decisions are made, who makes them and when does real decision-making occur. This paper examines the decision-making processes in a Southern California urban community targeted for renewal. Resident participation in the redevelopment of this area is analyzed through the social and cultural capital frameworks to ascertain the methods by which the transmission of participatory inequality continues to occur. This analysis shows that the acquisition of knowledge as a tool for meaningful civic participation is a gendered, classed and racialized process. Furthermore, the rules are not known to all participants. Similar to the ‘hidden curriculum’ that exists in educational settings, there are unwritten rules and knowledge of political processes that those from racialized minority groups are not fully made aware. As a result, participatory processes may on the surface appear democratic and inclusive, when in practice they are not open and available to everyone. This paper analyzes participation through cultural resource theory to problematize cultural and social capital within a culturally diverse urban setting. Through ethnographic methods this paper illustrates the ways that cultural resources are valued and devalued within the civic participatory sphere. More specifically, an analysis of three cultural resources integral to civic participation are examined through the eyes of Latino, Vietnamese, African American and Anglo residents active in the revitalization of City heights. The cultural resources analyzed are general cultural awareness, verbal facility and scientific knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper and presentation will explore the use of digital storytelling and community-based performance to open dialogue between children and the adults in their communities by providing a unique and non-threatening forum focused on the assets, strengths, and experiences of the children. A community-based arts practice fundamentally reconceptualizes the roles of both audience and maker destabilizing the traditional model of art that isolates an artist in his or her studio making something that then will be hung in a gallery or performed on Broadway. Community-based arts focus, instead, on participatory techniques in order to maximize participant agency. A primary goal of this practice is active and emancipatory involvement in cultural and civic life. This paper explores the program Place: Vision & Voice?s pilot project with foster children in the Child Protective Services System. In particular, the project focuses on children in long-term care who are just about to make the transition to independent living. Using the youth?s digital artwork to ground discussion, this paper explores the theory and practice of positive youth development work as a feedback loop into civic and cultural systems of care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How should we educate young people for lives of active, democratic citizenship? This question has gained importance in light of recent studies that document the high levels of youth disengagement from politics and public life (e.g. Bennett 2000; Sax et al 2000; see also Putnam 2000). While there is a general call among among political scientists and policy makers that something should be done to raise such low levels of engagement, there is little agreement about the best means to address this situation. A multitude of pedagogical approaches are offered– from learning core knowledge, to character education, to service learning, to public forums, to direct political action and public work, to simulation activities, etc. Throughout these debates on how to best educate citizens, you will hear the name John Dewey. Scholars of civic engagement recognize Dewey as an important figure and love to quote his more pithy statements like “democracy has to be reborn each generation, and education is its mid-wife” (e.g. Battistoni 2000). However, Dewey’s work is rarely analyzed in a sustained, substantive manner in relation to civic engagement. I argue that Dewey merits a closer look. He provides a much-needed perspective to this literature because his integrated philosophical approach theorizes the connections between and among civic experiences, individual development, social context and learning. One of the reasons why Dewey is often quoted, but rarely analyzed may be that Dewey does not treat education for citizenship as a distinct subject, but rather integrates it into general education in a democratic society. It can be argued that Dewey does not have a theory of democratic education, but instead advances a philosophy of education that is democratic and a democratic theory that is educative. I argue that force and import of Dewey’s writings on education for citizenship get lost in his comprehensive treatment. Therefore, in this paper, I am going to read Dewey narrowly, and reconstruct his democratic and educational theory to consider the critical resources and contributions that it can make to our understandings of youth civic engagement. I identify two key two key contributions that Dewey’s educational theory makes to our thinking and practice of youth civic engagement. First, Dewey provides an explicit theory and method of how young people learn the requisite civic and political knowledge, attitudes, and skills through engagement, and more importantly, how they can develop identities as active citizens, capable of effecting change in their everyday worlds. Dewey not only offers an educational method that is defined by problem solving and taking action in world, but offers a theoretical framework to examine how civic and political experiences can be educational. Second, Dewey offers a new perspective to think about civic engagement. By grounding education in experience, Dewey incorporates the concrete conditions of everyday life as domains of education and citizenship. I contend that only when we take into account the everyday conditions of existence can we have a concrete idea of how people can be transformed through participation (doing) to become active citizens (being). Instead of seeing people’s everyday lives as a barrier to participation (e.g. Putnam 1995; Rahn and Transue 1998; Bennett 2000), Dewey shows how this is the only possible starting point to build a sense of citizenship that is lived. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper will analyse how culture and formal political institutions interact in shaping more or less violent styles of conflict management. With reference to Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia it will be shown, how cultural predispositions and social practices amalgamate with different variants of (more or less) democratic institutions to produce fundamentally different perceptions of nation, state and inter-ethnic as well as inter-cultural conflict and, correspondingly, different practices of conflict-resolution. It is argued that any policy of democratization aiming at the reduction of collective violence has to sharpen the focus on the fit between type of political institution and cultural framings of social relations. Taking the wrong path of democratization will kindle instead of mitigate collective violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2002 the American Political Science Association created a committee on Civic Education and Engagement, charged with producing a report under the auspices of APSA. Our goals are to communicate what we know about civic engagement to a broader audience beyond our scholarly community and, hopefully, to suggest practical ways of enhancing participation in community life. The committee formed three working groups and our paper analyzes the nonprofit, voluntary, and philanthropic sectors. It addresses theoretical questions as well as public policy issues that affect the potential of nonprofits to engage citizens and to participate as organizations in the political process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discussions of democratic education often begin with a discussion of general political theories, and then based upon those theories, deduce what sort of education we would want for citizens. The goal of this paper is not to present a comprehensive curriculum for democratic education, but instead to focus on one component to include in such an education: empathy training. I contend that given the assumptions of several political theories, increasing citizens’ empathic predispositions should be an important part of democratic education. While they may disagree on many other points, deliberative democrats, civic republicans and political liberals should all agree that we want to instill empathic dispositions in citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This project examines the accessibility to the Kids Voting USA project in Arizona through an analysis of the availability of the program to youths during the November 2002 election. Kids Voting USA is a program that encourages children to become civically engaged by holding a parallel election to the general election. Many scholars have touted the accomplishments and successes of the Kids Voting USA project including its ability to decrease the gender gap, producing better-informed and politically active young people, and eve inspiring parents to vote. This paper furthers this research by examining the impact of the average wealth per capita and the size of recent immigrant subcultures on the participation levels and access to the Kids Voting USA project using OLS and Nonparametric tests. The findings suggest that despite a classroom presence in all counties and wealth classes, greater access to Kids Voting USA voting sites are more prevalent in wealthier counties. Counties with large immigrant subcultures also have fewer students able to or choosing to visit polling locations. These findings suggest that there are costs involved in the participation in the non-curricular segments of the Kids Voting USA project that limit the participation of least wealthy and the children of those who are not U.S. citizens yet. The greater access to the Kids Voting program reinforces the advantages of the wealthy in developing civic skills. However Kids Voting USA is making participation easier through online voting and mail-in voting. The effects of these new forms of participation are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Utilizing data from the 2000 community benchmark survey, this paper explores the impact of associational membership homogeneity on the effectiveness of civic associational engagement in fostering political participation. Contrary to the concerns of some in the social capital literature, we find that racial homogeneity of civic associations does not have an adverse impact on the propensity for minority political participation, and may in fact encourage political participation by whites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper reviews current literature on the impact of communication media on civic engagement. Studies examining the impact of television, telephone and the Internet are examined and critiqued. Special emphasis is placed on inadequacies of the Internet (or the Web) as a research construct in social sciences, and new five-factor model of communication media is proposed. According to the model, there are five basic dimensions to any communication technology: interactivity, directionality, mode, latency and capacity. The paper also proposes a reconceptualization of the social capital construct and introduces a network model of social capital for the information era. The models are then discussed in relation to a new communication policy initiative by the Aspen Institute that uses technical layers of a communication system as bases for regulatory action in the age of media convergence and transition to an IP environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the critical role that families play in the lives of citizens and the health of the polity, little attention has been paid to the role that the state should adopt with respect them. Instead, dominant versions of liberal political theory generally focus on individuals conceived apart from their relationships with others. Insofar as they consider families at all, these theories treat them as part of citizens' private lives, an area from which the state should properly remain aloof. This conception of the family-state relationship has contributed to a family policy in the United States that fails to support families and the goods associated with them. Recent revisionist versions of liberal theory, however, have begun to set the stage for rethinking the relationship between the state and the family. In focusing attention on the strong relationship between what William Galston calls the "moral culture of liberal society" and the health of a liberal polity (1991: 6), these discussions suggest (although they don't often explicitly recognize) the importance of the family's role. And in moving the discussion from seeking an impossible-to-attain neutral position for the state toward a position that makes no pretense toward neutrality yet ensures individuals considerable autonomy, these debates open the field for new conceptions of the family-state relationship. They also move the ground of debate away from simple consideration of the value of liberty toward recognition of a wider range of goods and a richer conception of human flourishing. In this paper, I begin the project of developing a sustained theory of the family-state relationship on this new terrain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An examination of the extent to which it still remains appropriate to use the term civic culture in the 21st century. Can the term be used in a political system in which there is dwindling public trust and respect for politicians and political institutions? How should we describe the contemporary political system? This paper looks at the recently conducted citizen audit of Britain to examine the public’s contemporary attitudes and behaviour in relation to these questions; in particular, it examines the public attitudes towards the political system in general, levels of political trust. political competence and efficacy, the level and range of political activities and associational involvements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on a three country survey study in the Dominican Republic, Poland and South Africa to assess the impact of donor-sponsored civic education programs on a variety of orientations and behaviors. Based on the results of our surveys of treatment and control groups from each program, we discuss the study’s implications for the implementation of civic education programs. We show that both the empirical effects and policy implications are more nuanced than has previously been recognized. Civic education can influence democratic behaviors and attitudes, but only when conducted frequently with certain kinds of participatory teaching methodologies. The policy implications are clear: civic education should be implemented only if it can be conducted "correctly" in a given political context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the aggregate relationship between mobilized forms of political activity and civic participation aimed at the local community. While levels of mobilized participation are directly dependent on strategic elite decisions and civic activity is not, we find that there is a strong relationship between the two types of activities. The implications of this finding for our understanding of the causes and consequences of aggregate political participation are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine how religious small group involvement influences civic volunteering and political participation among churchgoers in America. Recent work in political [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces the Hamer Institute and its civic education programs directed toward primary and secondary school teachers and secondary school students. It draws lessons from the civic education literature -- classic and contemporary -- and discusses some of the preliminary lessons learned by the Hamer Institute’s core faculty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]