Civic Involvement Research Articles

Charisma, Diversity, and Religion in the American City— A Reflection

The faith leaders of North American cities actively engage in the civic affairs of their urban communities. Religious leadership, charismatic preaching, and, possibly, reputation of prophetic powers, continue to play important roles especially in the African American civic leaders’ rise to public authority. The article reflects on the twenty-first-century significance of Max Weber’s concept of “charisma” in interpreting the civic involvement of urban religious leaders in one city in particular, Baltimore. The article suggests that within the context of Baltimore’s dramatic challenges associated with urban poverty, violence, and racial and socio-economic health disparities, charismatic religious leadership continues as a recognized form of communal authority especially among the city’s African Americans. The article suggests that the gender dynamics of contemporary charismatic leadership appears strikingly similar to another time period and place, also analyzed by Weber—namely, medieval Europe. Just as an intense personal faith granted some medieval religious women authority and position they would not have had in the institutions reserved for men, so too the religious leadership and personal experiences of faith support the urban advocacy of African American women leaders.

Political Transition and Democratic Teachers: Negotiating Citizenship in the Spanish Education System

The success of Spain’s transformation from a dictatorship to a stable democracy has triggered a lively discussion about the factors which contributed to the process. The question of civic participation in Spain’s political transformation has proved highly controversial and I suggest that observing professional domains and their implications for citizen formation processes provides a new way to evaluate the civic contribution to Spain’s democratization. Spanish teachers mobilized in the 1970s around two main issues: their working conditions and pedagogical methods. This article focuses on the implications of their common struggle to articulate, construct and disseminate democratic citizenship. It shows how they contributed to free deliberation, civic involvement and citizen empowerment, aspiring to supplement the concept of citizenship with those of active participation in community organizations, knowledge of governmental procedures, critical assessment of social, political and economic structures and addressing areas of injustice.

Civic engagement among educated Chinese youth: The role of SNS (Social Networking Services), bonding and bridging social capital

This study conducted a stratified and cluster sampling on Chinese college students (N = 654) to investigate how SNS usages and social capital elicit impact on civic engagement. The results of path regression model shows that using SNS to meet new people is positively correlated with bonding and bridging social capital in the virtual world, using SNS to contact existing friends contributes to both bonding and bridging social capital in the real world. Online bonding and bridging social capital are positively related to online civic involvement, but not significantly related to offline civic behaviors. Offline bonding and bridging social capital are positively associated with offline civic participation, but not significantly related to online civic participation. The direct effect of using SNS to meet new social ties on civic engagement is partially mediated by social capital, whilst the effect of using SNS to connect friends on civic participation is completely mediated by social capital.

What Motivates Youth Civic Involvement?

The topic of youth civic engagement is increasingly popular in social science research; however, the question of why some youth are civically involved while others are not is not well understood. This article addresses the following questions: What motivations and barriers do youth report for civic involvement? How do motivations and barriers differ across school contexts? A qualitative study using in-depth semi-structured interviews with youth ( N = 22) was used to identify four categories of motivations and two categories of barriers for civic involvement. Variation emerged in the motivations and barriers for civic involvement both within and across school contexts. Understanding civic motivations in context uncovers new insights about how to structure opportunities to better facilitate youth civic involvement.

The Legacies of 1989: Bulgaria's Year of Civic Anger

Abstract: This article offers an analytical interpretation of the various strategies which Bulgaria's mobilized citizens have recently deployed in order to hold political elites accountable. It focuses on post-accession hooliganism, a specific form of elite misbehavior which became increasingly visible after the country joined the European Union, and on civic anger, a political sentiment that spread as a popular reaction to this misbehavior. The main conclusion to which the examination of the ongoing process of antigovernment mobilization in Bulgaria lends credence is that civic involvement in democratic politics is the most important factor that might reverse the decline of a democracy's quality.

Does sociability predict civic involvement and political participation?

In contemporary history as well as in political science, a strong associational life known as sociability is thought to explain the roots of modern democracy by establishing a link between the increasing availability of free time to the middle classes, increasing willingness to gather with others in circles or associations, and increasing social capital. In personality psychology, sociability is related to prosocial behavior (i.e., the need for affiliation, agreeableness, openness, and extraversion), whose importance in different political behaviors is increasingly recognized. In the present article, we carried out 5 studies (N = 1,429) that showed that political and associative sociability (a) can be reliably assessed, can have cross-cultural validity, and are properly associated with general social interest measures and personality domains and facets in the five-factor model; (b) do not overlap with similar concepts used in political psychology to account for political participation (political expertise, political interest, political self-efficacy); and (c) predicted political and nonpolitical group membership as well as observable choices in decision-making tasks with political and nonpolitical outcomes. The results are discussed, taking into consideration the extent to which specific facets of sociability can mediate between general personality traits and measures of civic involvement and political participation in a holistic model of political behavior.

Citizens in the Present: Youth Civic Engagement in the Americas by Maria de los Angeles Torres, Irene Rizzini, and Norma Del Rio

 2014 Children, Youth and Environments Children, Youth and Environments 24(1), 2014 Citizens in the Present: Youth Civic Engagement in the Americas Maria de los Angeles Torres, Irene Rizzini, and Norma Del Rio (2013). University of Illinois Press, 184 pages. $21.50 USD (paperback). ISBN 978-0252079207. The topic of youth civic engagement is compelling analytically because of the dual lens it requires: in paying attention to how youth make meaning of their sociopolitical world and develop civic skills, we must also pay careful attention to their sociopolitical context. Civic engagement is not a developmental process that can be reduced to brain scans or controlled experiments. Each term is contested and varies across time and place. How are “youth” defined and what kinds of rights are accorded to young people? What role have civic institutions played in the histories of different nation states and for how long have different groups had the right to elect their leaders? One weakness of the emerging literature on civic engagement has been its predominance of studies in the United States, which can contribute to weak treatments of context that take U.S. history or institutions as if they are the way things are everywhere. Thankfully, this new volume from Maria de los Angeles Torres, Irene Rizzini, and Norma Del Rio places youth civic engagement in international perspective and embraces a sophisticated understanding of context. The study draws on interviews with and essays by young people between the ages of 15 and 24, who were nominated as civically active by community or public interest organizations in three global cities: Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, and Chicago. In each city roughly 25 youth participated in the study. The first and last chapters of the book are coauthored ; the second, third, and fourth chapters are sole-authored by experts from universities in the respective cities: de los Angeles Torres in Chicago, Rizzini in Rio de Janeiro, and Del Rio in Mexico City. The authors draw on a mix of disciplinary traditions to frame the work. On one hand there is a strong psychological orientation: the case studies privilege interviews and take an analytic approach that emphasizes topics such as childhood influences on engagement, motivations for civic involvement, and youths’ reasoning about social issues. The authors also, however, draw on social theory, including an important point about postmodern notions of temporality. Informed by statements from the youth participants in the study, the authors question the modern assumption that youth is a time of preparation for the future and instead claim young people’s rights to participation in the present. They write: In sum, these young people moved easily between modernist constructions of politics—equality, for example—while demanding a new temporality that was highly critical of modernity’s placement of youth in the future (140). Book Review: Citizens in the Present: Youth Civic Engagement in the Americas 184 Also, in a useful corrective to psychological approaches that tend to underplay cultural and historical context, the book begins with a concise account of historical and political influences on civic engagement in each country. Certain key contextual differences stand out. Brazil, for example, has codified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) into law and created child and youth councils to monitor the law. Similarly, Mexico in the 2000s passed several laws meant to recognize the rights of young people and create formal avenues for participation. Engagement with the UNCRC and its discourse of youth rights is weaker in the United States. But the treatment of context is not all about differences: the authors also argue that the single nation-state is no longer the primary determinant of young people’s future well-being, in part because of the steady pattern of transnational migration, but also because of the rise of multi-national corporations, which are not susceptible to legal or normative expectations for transparency, public participation, and accountability. As the authors write: “The nation-state is no longer the exclusive organizer of our economies, politics, or selves…” which “brings forth the question of what entity would guarantee rights that could be violated by multiple states and transnational entities” (7). This point has not received adequate...

Civic organizations and citizens-an alternative approach to understanding civic engagement

The importance of nonprofit, and inside classic civic sector is usually approached on the basis of figures of the Statistical Office. Based on these, we may assume these to have a slight or intermediate role in the greater economy regarding economic capacity and human resources. Actually, we cannot have a closer look into local conditions and circumstances which would contribute to a better understanding of how civic organizations are connected to citizens. It is difficult to estimate the background, effect, personal movements behind the civic sector; international literature discusses this issue in the framework of civic engagement. In a private examination, I may also contribute to the alternative approach to the importance of the civic organization sector by studying and measuring the complex indicator termed “civic involvement”. Additionally, a small scale pilot examination has revealed a better, more precise description of the connection between citizens and civic organizations, which may also enable the better planning of local municipal interventions.

IMPACT OF PERSONAL ORIENTATIONS ON ATTITUDES TO DIVERSITY AND CIVIC SOCIAL-POLITICAL ACTIVENESS

The dynamically ongoing processes of integration are among the crucial premises for the development of contemporary interpersonal, intergroup and cross-cultural relations, attitudes, conflicts and more. The research problem here directs to an analysis, based on ESS data collected in 8 countries, rounds 2006 and 2008, on the extent to which Europeans' personal orientations significantly influence the attitudes towards ethno-national diversity, in this case, towards two social groups: immigrants coming from poorer countries outside Europe and people with different sexual orientation. Furthermore, the influence of the same factors on the civic activeness and involvement in the social-political processes has been followed. Through regressive analysis the important effect of the co-otherness orientation (a concept developed by Sicakkan, 2003), the orientation to success and traditionalism on all included dependent variables has been proved. The expectations for predicting effects of the three personal orientations have been confirmed regarding the civic involvement and tolerance to diversity. Simultaneously the necessity of working EU politics to deal with the risks of emerging negative attitudes has been pointed out in relation to the broad immigrant and refugee wave to European countries. Key words: attitudes towards immigrants, civic activeness, co-otherness.

Understanding E-Democracy Government-Led Initiatives for Democratic Reform

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) offer opportunities for greater civic participation in democratic reform. Government ICT use has, however, predominantly been associated with e-government applications that focus on one-way information provision and service delivery. This article distinguishes between e-government and processes of e-democracy, which facilitate active civic engagement through two-way, ongoing dialogue. It draws from participation initiatives undertaken in two case studies. The first highlights efforts to increase youth political engagement in the local government area of Milton Keynes in the United Kingdom. The second is Iceland’s constitutional crowdsourcing, an initiative intended to increase civic input into constitutional reform. These examples illustrate that, in order to maintain legitimacy in the networked environment, a change in governmental culture is required to enable open and responsive e-democracy practices. When coupled with traditional participation methods, processes of e-democracy facilitate widespread opportunities for civic involvement and indicate that digital practices should not be separated from the everyday operations of government. While online democratic engagement is a slowly evolving process, initial steps are being undertaken by governments that enable e-participation to shape democratic reform.

Cultivating Success: Youth Achievement, Capital and Civic Engagement in the Contemporary United States

Amidst current research on the positive impact of rising rates of youth civic participation, but also indications of a shift in the underlying forms of civic life and increasing socioeconomic disparities in levels of participation, the authors investigate the meaning of civic engagement from the perspective of high-school-aged youth. The authors inductively develop a typology of engagement based on in-depth interviews with a purposive stratified sample of eighty-nine high school students in a Midwestern city. The authors find that youth link civic engagement with ambition and achievement as a means to build capital in a Bourdieuian field of youth achievement. While civic engagement is informed by structural position, youth are actively involved in navigating their positions and choices. Civic engagement emerges primarily through volunteerism as youth struggle to assemble and deploy capital in the achievement field and thus compound class-based disparities in civic involvement.

Common Ground, Multiple Claims: Representing and Constructing Singapore’s “Heartland”

This article examines the various meanings of “heartland” and “heartlander” in Singapore that emerged as the city-state embarked on its transformation into a global city in the 1990s. It discusses the political and ideological nature of these terms, including the way the state has tended to deploy them and the ways they are used in public discourse. The terms’ usage serves as a measure of the state’s not unproblematic attempts to define its citizenry in order to reinscribe its legitimacy. The deployment of the terms by non-state actors and individuals, however, indicates greater civic involvement in national self-identification, which complicates the official state version. The article focuses on two significant Singapore texts that contribute to the cultural imaginary of the heartland and the heartlander – the novel Heartland by Daren Shiau and the film Eating Air by Kelvin Tong and Jasmine Ng. In implicit opposition to the state view, these creative works seek to convey a sense of the local and of national authenticity through their creative representation of the Singapore heartland and what it means to be a heartlander, disclosing in the process various social tensions, silences and cultural blind spots.

(Post)-conflict Memories and Identity Narratives in the Documentary Series I Am Africa

During the last century, film and video have become important inspiring documents of collective memory; in this century, they have become an increasingly important source of evidence and historical reflection. This paper aims to analyse the documentary series I Am Africa. Consisting of ten episodes, I Am Africa gives voice to ten citizens – two from each of the Portuguese-speaking African countries: Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and Sao Tome and Principe – with significant civic involvement in the development of the nations where they were born and currently live. Through thematic analysis of the ten stories, which make up the documentary series, were located the predominant themes in the narratives of those involved. The results of this research show the narrative organization of the ten interviewees in three central themes: the meanings of independence, which involve the representations of the people who have participated in the process of (de)colonization; the perceptions about the cultural and linguistic diversity in their countries; and, finally, the discourses associated with the (re)making of national identities.

Social Class and Social Capital in China and Britain: A Comparative Study

We use the China General Social Survey (2005) and the Home Office Citizenship Survey (2005) to study civic engagement and neighbourhood trust in China and Britain in this paper. We focus on class differences in participation in sports/recreation, religion, children's/adult education and public-welfare activities, and trust in the neighbours. We find higher levels of civic involvement in Britain but greater neighbourhood trust in China. This is mainly due to structural differences. China has a large proportion of peasants who have very low levels of civic involvement but very high levels of neighbourhood trust. Among the non-peasant population, the two countries have similar levels of class differences in civic (except religious) involvement. There are small class differences in China on neighbourhood trust, but marked effects in Britain. Overall, there is a greater similarity than difference in class effects in both civic engagement and social trust in the two countries. While differences in demographic attributes (and China's specific institutional arrangement, the household registration system, or hukou) account for some of the observed patterns, we also find more pronounced class than demographic effects in the two countries. Class plays a major role in the development of social capital.

Immigrant generation, religiosity and civic engagement in Britain

Immigrant integration appears to be generational in the USA, and further facilitated by religious involvement. We examine whether similar patterns exist in Britain. We find evidence for secularization across ethnic minority groups, measured by private religious practice and religious salience. Communal religious practice appears robust to generational decline. Ethnic minority members of the second generation exhibit lower social trust; for the 1.5 generation, being more religious is associated with lower trust. However, members of the 1.5 and second generation are more civically involved than the first and religiosity further increases civic involvement. While anecdotal accounts suggest that religiosity has a particularly dissociative effect on the second generation, we find no evidence for this. In sum, successive generations of ethnic minority respondents appear to be secularizing; successive generations are more civically involved than the arriving generation, although less trusting; and immigrant religiosity promotes civic integration.

EU cohesion policy, horizontal partnership and the patterns of sub-national governance: Insights from Central and Eastern Europe

This article draws on the concept of Europeanization to assess the EU cohesion policy’s capacity to promote inclusive regional governance and cooperation in regional development initiatives in Central and Eastern European countries. EU cohesion policy is often credited with improving cooperation and coordination in the delivery of the regional development policy through the application of multi-level governance enshrined in the partnership principle. By imposing a close partnership among a variety of actors, cohesion policy has the capacity to alter domestic relations between the centre and the periphery, and to create a broader scope for regional and bottom-up involvement in economic development policy. However, a lack of tradition of decentralization and collaborative policy-making, as well as a limited capacity of sub-national actors, can result in uneven outcomes of the application of the partnership principle across countries and regions. This raises questions about the transferability of the partnership approach to new Member States characterized by weak sub-national institutions, a legacy of centralized policy-making and limited civic involvement. This paper addresses this issue by comparing horizontal partnership arrangements put in place for the purpose of cohesion policy implementation and examining their impacts on the patterns of sub-national governance. The horizontal partnership arrangements are compared across three regions in countries with differentiated systems of territorial administration: Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary.

Civic involvement across the life course: moving beyond age-based assumptions.

This paper critically examines factors which, over time and context, are linked to civic involvement for individuals, age groups, and cohorts. We begin by critiquing current age- and cohort-related civic involvement canons and norms by extracting and evaluating rationales for why such activity in two particular periods of life-early adulthood and old age-is assumed to be good for individuals and for society. Then, employing elements of a life course perspective, we consider an alternative approach to civic involvement-one that emphasizes dynamic trajectories and the significant degree of variability within individuals, age groups and cohorts resulting in a very different set of assumptions about individual choice and activity. We close by discussing the utility of this alternative approach for research, policy, and practice regarding civic involvement.

The Right to Vote and the Rise of Democracy, 1787-1828

Historians and political scientists continue to emphasize the connection between the expansion of the suffrage to almost all adult white males and Andrew Jackson's election to the presidency in 1828. That interpretation has the unfortunate effect of preventing general appreciation of what has been clear to specialists for decades, that the suffrage had significantly expanded and the United States become in many ways a functioning democracy long before 1815. Even before the Revolution at least 60 percent of adult white males had been able to vote, and that figure had expanded significantly by 1787. The traditional belief that voting must be restricted to those with a "stake in society" still persisted, but increasingly the stake was measured less by the freehold ownership of landed property than by measures of civic involvement such as taxpaying, militia service, and evidences of social contribution. Qualifications defined by wealth were gradually undermined by inflation, and restrictions on voting proved difficult to enforce in practice. After partisan differences became inflamed in the 1790s, turnouts rose to unprecedented—and sometimes unrepeated—levels. In the end this pressure from below created a situation in which even conservatives thought that honest elections required the legal recognition of what was in fact happening at the polls. There was no constitutional revolution in the 1820s, except in New York, and the growing political agitation that resulted in Jackson's election was nothing more than the application to presidential elections of what had become commonplace in many states before 1815.

Community College and Community Leader Expectations of the “Village”

A level of consistency between community college leaders and community leaders is necessary to demonstrate behaviors, actions, and beliefs that shape, represent, and support expected community values. Likewise, communities, which are collectives of suborganizations, play an important role in aiding individual development, especially related to educational attainment. This study sought to understand ways in which community college leaders and community leaders demonstrate behaviors, actions, and beliefs that shape, represent, and support community values, particularly the influence on an individual's acceptance of formalized education and continued education beyond compulsory schooling. Data were collected from 113 mayors and community college presidents/deans around the United States. Analysis of the data indicated five types of actions consistent among the two groups including the promotion of civic involvement, community growth and development, economic development, well-being of citizens, and value of education.

Online Civic Identity. Extraction of Features

The paper presents the importance of study the reactions of the readers and writers of online journals forums from the civic identity point of view, in order to put in evidence categories of publics in the benefit of media, persons and groups. The method is intended to help journalists, PR specialists who are motivated to understand their publics and to target them in a more precise way, in order to upgrade the impact of their online discourse on the people in the community, to know how deep the civic involvement of the people is to the problems of the community.