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The article reports on the development of civic agency in college students by former U.S. President Barack Obama. It mentions the use of Barack Obama's resumé, as a community activist in Chicago in the 2008 Presidential campaign that emphasis upon the health of civic community in the U.S. It also mentions that a political scientist Robert Putnam has provided empirical evidence supporting the claim that civic community.

Since spring 2001, Professors Sharon Barrios and Lori Weber and student editors have produced three annual volumes of Studium: The Student Journal of Politics in the Department of Political Science at California State University, Chico. The main goal of the Studium project is to offer students a unique educational opportunity. Studium gives student authors a chance to publish quality papers and to reference their publication on resumes and graduate or law school applications. It also gives other students an opportunity to read their peers’ high-quality work. In addition, it gives the student editors the chance to read, critique, and edit a wide array of papers on politics. In the process the students learn production skills, including desk-top publishing; diplomacy skills as they work closely with student authors; grant writing skills as they strive to find journal funding; and promotional skills in order to solicit papers, contact university libraries for journal placement, organize an annual journal conference, and to begin to develop a nationwide student journal association. Finally, Studium supplies instructors with a convenient teaching tool with its examples of high quality student papers. This paper provides an account of our experience with the organizing, production, and maintenance of this unique educational opportunity for both students and professors. Student journals are fairly common in English departments in universities around the United States. However, to the best of our knowledge, this is the only student journal located in a U.S. Political Science department. Consequently, this paper will mark the beginning of an effort to assist in expanding this practice to other universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Voting participation has long been a focus of American democratic theories. Putnam (2000) provided a sociological perspective, while Verba et. al. (1995) and traditional literature on political participation emphasized the political and economic perspectives. Based on Putnam's social capital thesis, it is important to look at an individual's social network. If the network is broken, so is the individual's drive to participate. From the traditional voting literature, however, one needs to focus more on "human capital" (SES) and "political capital" (e.g., parties and interest groups, and racial group as mobilizing political units). We test these hypotheses based on human capital variables and social capital variables, in addition to other controls such as age, internet usage, gender and immigration status. We test both between group differences and within-group differences with GSS data which provides a national sample for racial groups. We use the Bayesian approach to solve some of the methodological problems, especially the issue of missing data and under sampling for minority groups. The most important finding is that while both social capital and human capital are important for white voting participation, for blacks only bonding social capital measured by church attendance is the most important factor in enhancing political participation. SES, on the other hand, does not explain black voting participation. We conclude that social capital does explain voting participation. The utility of social capital theory, however, must be put in a racial context. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the central claims of the burgeoning experimental research on deliberation is that deliberation changes opinions. This paper argues that research on deliberation, when examining policy opinion change in pre- and posttests, must also pay careful attention to an important issue in survey research-"ambivalent" respondents who do not initially express opinions/attitudes. Specifically, this paper examines policy opinion change of "ambivalent" respondents-measured as respondents who begin on the "neither agree nor disagree" midpoint-in pretests administered on a representative sample of 568 Pittsburgh residents who came to a one-day deliberation experiment in July 2004. We find that respondents who begin on the midpoint prior to deliberation change significantly less and in the opposite direction than those who take initial positions. Moreover, we find that these respondents are more likely to possess lower levels of political awareness. Consequently, we argue that deliberation has different (if any) effects on these types of individuals, and this should be taken into consideration in future empirical analyses of deliberative experiments. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from a representative sample of 568 Pittsburgh residents who came to a one day deliberative experiment, this paper examines the effect of deliberation on political knowledge and sophistication--a trait called ?deliberative learning.? ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]