Political Behavior of Muslims in the US: Transition from Isolation to Political Participation

* This paper owes a great debt to my students in the National Opinion Research Center Training program, who did much to rekindle my interest in ideology. I would also like to thank Sidney Verba and Kenneth Prewitt for their intellectual contributions at various stages. The first draft of the paper was written while I was a research Fulbright Fellow at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands. I would like to express my appreciation to the Fulbright Foundation for support during this period and to the University of Leiden for supporting the research. Additional support for myself and for the research was provided by the National Science Foundation under Grant GS 3155 and the Twentieth Century Fund. The data reported in this article come from seven separate surveys and the organization and presentation was a mammoth job in data management. This task could not have been accomplished without the efforts of Carol Ann Lugtigheid, Eric Lugtigheid, John R. Petrocik, Jaap Rozema, and Jaap van Poelgeest.

The significance of political participation in social governance and development is increasingly prominent. Citizens’ institutionalized political participation stands as a primary symbol of realizing people’s ownership. Public trust in government, a crucial emotional element of political participation, serves as a bridge for institutionalized political participation. This study formulates a moderated mediation model, encompassing public cognition, emotions, attitudes, and political behaviors. The model aims to elucidate the attributional paths of governmental governance capacity, social justice, and social security on public trust in government and political participation. The findings underscore three pivotal antecedents of public trust in government: citizens perceptions of governance capacity, social justice, and social security foster political participation behavior through public trust in government, subsequently influencing overall political participation. Political efficacy plays a moderating role, influencing the strength of the mediating effect from public trust in government to institutionalized political participation. This addresses a gap in prior research on the intrinsic motivation of citizens’ political engagement. The study emphasizes the role of political efficacy in facilitating and motivating individuals for “orderly political participation,” providing a practical foundation for enhancing the stability of social governance and democratic development.

This study examines the mediating role of emotions toward presidential candidates in the relationship between news media attention and political campaign participation. Numerous studies have investigated the effect of news media attention on political participatory behavior. Research in this area, however, focused mostly on cognitive variables as influences on people's behavior. We hypothesize that emotional reactions to candidates can mediate the effect of news media attention on political campaign participation. Using the 2004 American National Election Studies, we test this hypothesis employing structural equation modeling. Results show that both news media attention and the amount of emotions toward candidates are positively associated with political campaign participation. The relationship between TV news attention and political participation is fully mediated by the emotions toward both candidates, whereas the relationship between newspaper attention and political participation is partially mediated. In other words, TV news only has an indirect effect on political participation through emotional reactions toward candidates.

The Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan

This work aims to understand how old-age pension coverage influences political attitudes and behavior of senior citizens in non-Western regions of the world, including sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, Arab lands, and Latin America. This dissertation notes that old-age pension coverage deserves particular attention in researching senior citizens’ political behavior and attitudes. The demand for attention is justified when we consider the pension system’s economic repercussions, public salience, and symbolic role of representing governments’ efforts to expand social benefits to the larger population. However, the relevant policy-feedback research focusing on pensions is incipient at best. Previous works regionally focusing on a few Western welfare states are short of applying their findings to broader areas that have different political and economic contexts. Employing both quantitative and qualitative approaches, I develop a research project on policy feedback of old-age pension coverage beyond the Western setting. First, I conduct multilevel cross-national analyses with regard to the effect of pension coverage on senior citizens’ political participation, using the data from Barometer surveys and various macro-level statistics. Results show that a proportion of 'social' pensioners among the elderly population encourages average participation levels of voting and protesting among older people in low-income countries and demonstrative behavior in authoritarian states. I also carry out mediation analyses to discover whether pension coverage boosts political participation of senior citizens by giving them political resources or psychological empowerment. I find that internal efficacy implying empowered individuals delivers the indirect effect of ‘total’ pension coverage onto the protests of seniors. Second, I conduct multilevel analyses to investigate the effect of pension coverage on senior citizens’ political trust. These reveal that broader old-age pension coverage playing the role of long-term economic security can create more critical attitudes of senior citizens toward presidents or prime ministers in low-income countries. Moving on to research of the short-term effect of pension coverage on political trust with a regional focus on Latin American countries, I discover that pension policies expanding coverage boost political trust of both senior and non-senior citizens within two or three years. Last, qualitative analyses using interview data in Singapore and South Korea dig deeper into how senior citizens' attitudes toward pension policies are associated with these nations’ dominant pension schemes. The broad coverage of tax-funded pension system in Korea—as opposed to Singapore, which lacks such a system—is found to generate feelings of distributional injustice, less trust in other senior citizens, and ageist self-views. My research shows that Korean seniors perceive higher levels of pension abuse even above actual levels and are thus more cautious in supporting an expansion of pension coverage or an increase in benefit levels. Moreover, interview participants in South Korea are more ashamed of a financial burden put on the working population providing the source of social benefits and link the burden to their reluctance to support increasing pension or social benefits for seniors.

Social media is one of the new forms of communication with the public and their use has been extended to a political level. Their features, such as the ability to create dialogue, quick personalized contact, and better targeting have made them one of the main channels of communication for political and non political promotion purposes. Nowadays, their increasingly important role in elections is more than evident. On the one hand, political behavior is largely related to the influence of communication to refer to the exchange of messages between individuals or groups for the purpose of information transfer and mutual influence. On the other hand, at political level, political groups or candidates seek ways to communicate as effectively as possible with the public in order to cope with intense competition. In this context, social media tools are used in order to transmit information to the voters. In addition, in Greece, the influence of social media on political participation and political behavior has not been extensively researched. For this reason, this paper examines the influence of social media on political participation and behavior, using a questionnaire for the electoral period from 5 th May until 5 th June . The results shows that the interest of users of social media in politics is modest, despite the fact that politics are quite important to them, as well as the influence of promotional messages on users can be described as above average. Respondents believing that political promotional messages placed on social media can shape political reality.

Despite a few pockets of evidence to the contrary, the traditional literature on youth political attitudes and political participation generally asserts that young people in Western democracies are shunning institutionalized politics such as voting, for non-institutionalized politics such as protests. Young people are also argued to be the least adherent to attitudes that support democracy as a political system. Extant research has looked to socioeconomic resources, incentives, and value/cultural changes for explanations to the observed trends. The explanatory potential of demography, however, remains unexplored. This dissertation accordingly examines whether the share of young people within the adult population of democratic countries explains their political attitudes and participation. It investigates the effects of young people’s cohort size on their individual propensities to (1) vote in national elections, (2) participate in peaceful demonstrations (3) support democracy as a political system, across both established and new democracies. The study uses single-level and multilevel logistic regression modeling techniques within large -N research designs, on individual-level data from World Values Survey Waves 3-7 (1995- 2020), and country-level data from the United Nations Population Division, World Bank, the Polity IV democracy Index, and the Economist Intelligence Unit, in three research studies that comprise this portfolio dissertation. The study shows that young people’s cohort size predicts key youth political attitudes and participation in both institutionalized and non institutionalized activities. Young people’s cohort size was found to exert significant direct effects on their propensities to vote in national elections, participate in peaceful demonstrations, and support democracy as a political system. On the one hand, the larger the cohort size of the youth, the less likely that compared to their peers in democratic societies with smaller youth cohort sizes: I. They will vote in national elections. II. Those with higher education will participate in protests when faced with high rates of unemployment. The mechanism by which young people’s cohort size affects their political participation behaviors is argued in this dissertation to manifest through a reduction in the social and economic fortunes of young people growing as part of a large youth population, due to a disequilibrium between their large numbers and the often-limited employment opportunities in the labor market. I argue that this imbalance between their demography and available economic opportunities tends to delay their transition into adulthood, marked by social and economic milestones such as completion of education, gainful employment, marriage, ability to afford your own accommodation, and also provide financial assistance to their significant others. The quest to improve their socioeconomic situations consequently deflects their attention from the more political demands of life, towards a focus on meaningfully integrating into economic life, in order to achieve these social markers of adulthood at that stage of their lives. And while, on the other hand, it is tempting to believe that such declining commitments to political participation by young people could actually be symptomatic of a more serious disillusion with democracy itself as a political system, the findings of this study are rather reassuring in this regard. The study shows that a large youth cohort size associates positively with young people’s propensity to support democracy as a political system. Importantly, however, this positive effect is conditional upon the quality of democracy of the countries in which they live, such that the more established a democratic society, the stronger the propensity that members of a youth bulge will show approval for democracy as a political system. I argue, therefore, that contemporary young people in democratic societies are rather shrewd. They behave like critical citizens/dissatisfied democrats: they believe in and remain committed to the core ideals of democracy as a political system and support it. Their declining commitment to key political activities such as voting and participation in demonstrations, particularly for the unemployed among them, in the face of their burgeoning numbers, may thus be related more to efforts at navigating around the existential challenges associated with being a part of a youth bulge, which cause them to, sometimes, prioritize socioeconomic goals over politics. To an extent, the feeling of a lack of political efficacy may also account especially for their voter apathy. The present findings are novel and hold important implications for both theory and empirical research.

O F ALL POSSIBLE POLITICAL ACTIONS the voting decision has received the most attention from behavioral political scientists. Probably we have compiled and analyzed more data on candidate choice and turnout than on any other form of political behavior. Of course, this heavy emphasis comes as no surprise. The voting act is the fundamental political act in a democracy. It is the most widespread political act. Furthermore, on the surface, at least, the voting act would appear to be one of the simplest (and therefore, most understandable) political acts. A heavy scholarly focus on the voting act follows naturally from these considerations. While our data base expands, however, our theoretical superstructure remains far from finished. It is fair to say that political science has relied chiefly on models rooted in the sociological, and later the social-psychological tradition.' These models hold that

Chapter 18 - Aging and politics: age differences in political behavior in comparative perspective

Do migrant social networks shape political attitudes and behavior at home?

In the era of digital communication, social media platforms have emerged as significant forums for political socialization, enabling individuals to engage in discussion and express their viewpoints on political issues. This study aims to investigate the perception of Pakistani journalists regarding political participation. The main objective of the study is to find out whether political participation on Twitter (X) makes journalists participate in real-life political events or discussions and to inquire about the perspective of journalists on whether their political decisions changed due to Twitter (X) usage. The study employed a quantitative research design. The researcher utilized a survey method to collect the data. The sample of the study consisted of 200 working journalists, selected by using purposive sampling technique i.e., all selected journalists were users of Twitter (X) and members of the National Press Club Islamabad, Pakistan. The findings of the study revealed that a significant majority of journalists in Pakistan utilize Twitter (X) for political discussion, highlighting the platform’s importance in shaping political perspectives. The results indicated that more use of Twitter (X) catalyzes journalists’ political participation. The majority of journalists were of the view that their online political participation encouraged them to engage in offline political participation. Furthermore, the study emphasized the important role of Twitter (X) in empowering journalists to articulate their opinions on political issues and potentially impact the decision-making process. Moreover, findings revealed that Twitter (X) is a significant platform for open dialogue and debate regarding political issues. The research contributes to the understanding of the role of social media in political participation, particularly in the context of Pakistan’s media landscape. The findings have implications for policymakers, journalists, and researchers interested in the intersection of communication, politics, and social media. Further research can build on these findings by exploring the impact of Twitter (X) on journalists’ political behavior and decision-making processes in more depth.

During the past four decades, there has been a fascination with the relationship of education to democratic citizenship and political participation, a relationship made evident by the numerous studies on political socialization that correlate [End Page 423] education to political attitudes, behaviors, and knowledge (e.g., Almond & Verba, 1963; Putnam, 1993; Nie, Junn, & Stehlik-Barry, 1996; Niemi & Junn, 1998; Hahn, 1998). In these works, education is the single most powerful predictor of civic and political engagement, and therefore considered one of the keys to strengthening civic culture. Almond and Verba (1963) observed that among other variables "none compares with the educational variable in the extent to which it seems to determine political attitudes" (p. 379), and Putnam (1993) stated that "education is one of the most powerful influences on political behavior almost everywhere, including Italy" (p. 118). On the other hand, Nie, Junn, and Stehlik-Barry (1996)argue that political engagement (knowledge of and participation in politics) is determined by one's relative, rather than absolute, educational attainment, whereas democratic enlightenment (values and norms) increases in step with educational attainment. Although it is clear that formal education has an effect on political behavior, it is more difficult to determine if education is an independent variable or a proxy of other variables, such as social class, and school is sorting out by socioeconomic status. In addition, there has been a smaller body of work on the theory of democratic education, highlighted in 1916 with John Dewey's landmark Democracy and Education, which asserts the prominent role of education to the success of democratic culture (e.g., Dewey, 1916, 1939; Gutmann, 1987; Torres, 1998).

PurposeThis study examines Pateman's “spillover thesis” that democratic participation in the workplace will “spill over” into political participation. It applies a latent class analysis (LCA) to identify patterns of political behavior and uses workplace participation and political efficacy as predicting variables of political behavior patterns.Design/methodology/approachThis study analyzed the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) in 2014 General Social Survey (GSS) data. This study applied a LCA to identify distinct patterns in people's political behaviors and did a multinomial regression analysis to predict the patterns with workplace participation and political efficacy.FindingsThe study found partial support for the spillover thesis. Among three distinct political behavior patterns, two active patterns were associated with political efficacy. However, the mediation from workplace participation to political participation through political efficacy was not supported. Respondents involved in workplace units that collectively make work-related decisions were more likely to be active in political behaviors, but only one set of political activities. Higher political efficacy was found to lead to more active overall political participation of both patterns.Originality/valueUnlike the previous studies of democratic spillover, which treated political behaviors either as independent types of behaviors or as a summative index of such binary coded variables, this study addressed such shortcomings of the previous studies by providing a more complex picture of political behavior patterns and their relationship with workplace participation. Future research can build on this unique methodological endeavor to explore a holistic picture of how workplace practices can influence politics and democracy through individual workers.

The increasing popularity of social network sites (SNSs), such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter, in political campaigns and governance, has captivated researchers in the past several years. This entry aims to provide a comprehensive review and synthesis of the burgeoning empirical research literature on political behavior in SNSs by leading researchers from various fields. Research domains under review include how citizens use SNSs for political purposes and the effects of SNSs on political attitudes and behavior such as social capital, civic engagement, and political participation, how candidates and voters utilize SNSs during election campaigns, how governmental institutions employ SNSs, and the potential dark side of SNSs such as selective exposure and political polarization. Finally, future research directions of the field are discussed.

News media consumption is vital to understanding democracy in Latin America. Democracy in the region lacks consolidation that may be encouraged by the ability of news media to shape individuals' political attitudes and behaviors. Yet, we know very little about how citizens of Latin American countries consume news media or how that consumption affects attitudes and behavior. This study offers a region-wide examination of the factors that shape news media consumption and the effects of that consumption on individuals in the region. To explore this topic, I examine survey data from the 2008 Latin American Public Opinion Project in 18 Latin American countries. I argue that news media promote democratic attitudes and political behavior by increasing the symbolic value of democracy and by supplementing those symbols with information that further encourages democratic attitudes and political participation. Additionally, political behavior is not temporally proximate to political behaviors such as voting. This necessitates a mediated path for news media consumption to influence participation through political interest, civil society participation and democratic attitudes. My findings illustrate that each news medium type (TV, radio, newspaper) must be considered separately from each other type. I find that news media consumption has little effect on attitudes. The effect of news media consumption on behavior is best understood as mediated paths through political interest and civil society participation. An additional analysis examines the state of internet use in the region. In total, this project offers a broad understanding of how news media consumption affects individual-level democracy in Latin America.