Civic Engagement and Civic Attitudes in Cross-National Perspective: Introduction to the Symposium

Abstract

Although civic engagement as a field of study has a long tradition in political science, it re-emerged in the 1990s as a result of real world events and academic scholarship. Popular revolutions in Eastern Europe and elsewhere led to a renewed interest in ‘people power’ across the world, including in the United States.And political scientist Robert Putnam’s study of civic community in Italy, followed by his analysis of changing patterns of social capital in the United States, helped to launch a new research agenda in the fields of comparative and American politics. Indeed, over the last fifteen years since the publication of Making Democracy Work, and over a decade since the article versions of what eventually became Bowling Alone, numerous works have addressed the themes of civil society and social capital, in a wide variety of theoretical and empirical contexts (see, for example, Adler and Kwon, 2002; van Deth, 1997; Foley and Edwards, 1999; Glaeser et al., 2002; Hooghe and Stolle, 2003; Howard, 2003; Lidstrom, 2006; Lin, 2001; Newton, 2006; Paxton, 2002; Portes, 1998; Woolcock, 1998).