Schools and Civic Norms
David E. Campbell
Department of Political Science
Institute for Educational Initiatives
University of Notre Dame
[email protected]
574-631-7809 (phone)
574-631-4405 (fax)
Abstract
Scholars have looked, largely in vain, for evidence that schools affect the civic
engagement of their students. This paper suggests that their search has been mostly
unsuccessful because their focus has mistakenly been on a school’s formal curriculum.
One important, but underappreciated, way that schools shape the civic engagement of
their students is by fostering a sense of civic responsibility, which arises in large part
from the civic norms within a school – a school’s “civic climate.” Strong civic norms
lead adolescents to internalize a sense of civic duty, which increases their level of voter
turnout well past adolescence. Enhancing civic norms within America’s schools,
therefore, has the potential to stem the decline in political engagement, especially voter
turnout, among young people.
1
America’s schools have the mandate to prepare young people for a lifetime of
active citizenship. Forty state constitutions explicitly refer to the need for an informed
electorate, while “thirteen of these constitutions state that the central purpose of their
educational system is to promote good citizenship, democracy, and free government”
(Carnegie Corporation and CIRCLE 2003). Yet judging from the low, and declining,
level of engagement in the electoral process among young people, our schools are not
doing enough to encourage them to be involved – or at least they could be doing more.
This paper argues that one underappreciated way in which schools can prepare their
students for active involvement in the nation’s civic life is through the way, as
communities, they teach students the obligations of citizenship.
The Setting
Owing to a “life-cycle effect,” young people have always voted at rates lower
than their elders and probably always will. They are less likely than their elders to have
completed their education, gotten married, had children, bought homes and so forth, all of
which facilitate civic involvement. But even when we take into account their point in the
life cycle, young people today vote at lower rates than young people in the past. In the
1972 presidential election, when the ink was barely dry on the Twenty-Sixth Amendment
giving eighteen-to-twenty year olds the vote, 52 percent of eighteen to twenty-four year
olds turned out at the polls. In the 2000 contest, the closest in modern history, that fell to
42 percent; turnout in the 1998 congressional elections among this age group was half
that (Levine and Lopez 2002). While, at this writing, the turnout figures for the 2004
election are still preliminary, initial estimates indicate that youth turnout, while higher
2
than in the two previous elections stills falls short of turnout farther back,
notwithstanding that 2004 saw unprecedented efforts at mobilizing young voters (Center
for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement 2004). In future years,
it is likely that voter turnout overall will decline precipitously given the current trajectory
of civic engagement among the youngest members of the electorate (Miller and Shanks
1996; Putnam 2000).
Does low voter turnout among young people matter? From a self-interested
perspective, it does if you are one of those young people. Elected officials have
demonstrated that they are acutely sensitive to groups within the electorate that have
consistently high rates of voting, and other forms of political engagement. America’s
senior citizens are the quintessential example. Seniors are a highly engaged group, and
consequently policymakers are highly responsive to seniors’ policy preferences,
particularly on social security (Campbell 2003). By voting in such low numbers, young
people make it less likely that lawmakers will take their preferences into account when
formulating policy.
Low voter turnout, however, has consequences beyond the narrow interests of any
segment of the electorate, as casting a ballot is about more than self-interestedly
advancing one’s personal preferences. Voting has a communal dimension to it, thus
triggering a concern that voter apathy impacts a whole that is greater than the sum of
individuals’ interests. The level of voter participation is an important indicator of our
electoral system’s legitimacy. As turnout falls, that legitimacy is threatened.
3
Schools and Civic Education
Political scientists have long looked to schools as an important source of
preparation for engagement in the political process (Merriam 1931; Merriam 1934). As
survey research became a widespread tool of social science in the 1960s and early 1970s,
political scientists had high hopes for the empirical study of how civics instruction affects
the political engagement of young people. Since one’s level of educational attainment
had long been shown to be an important factor contributing to civic orientations, it
seemed logical to turn to research to determine the means through which schools have
their effect. However, in this first wave of empirical research into the effects of civic
education, little evidence was uncovered that civics instruction has any bearing on civic
attitudes and/or behavior in either the short- or long-term. In summarizing this literature,
Richard Niemi and Jane Junn remark that “the accepted wisdom in the political science
profession is that civics classes have little or no effect on the vast majority of students”
(1998, 16).
Scholars have offered numerous reasons for the absence of a link between civics
courses and civic attitudes and behavior. For one, by its very nature civics instruction is
not confined to a single course, or to school at all, in a way that is unique among
academic subjects. Unlike politics, you are not going to learn much algebra or chemistry
from reading the newspaper or watching television. Students, however, can absorb a lot
of political information from their environment, making classroom instruction redundant.
Furthermore, even within schools politically relevant material is covered in the course of
studying subjects other than what was once called civics (and is more commonly known
today as social studies). Pamela Conover and Donald Searing have found that this is
4
especially true in literature classes (2000). Also, Paul Beck and M. Kent Jennings (1982)
suggest that civics instruction is more or less constant across different schools, making it
difficult to uncover its effect on variables like political knowledge or efficacy.
As political scientists’ attention began to turn away from adolescent socialization
to other topics, there was little new research on the impact of classroom civics
instruction. And so the conventional wisdom remained that classroom civics instruction
had little or no impact on civic outcomes. Recently, scholarly attention has again turned
to civic education, with research that questions the long standing conventional wisdom.
Civics classes, it turns out, appear to have an effect on civic education after all. However,
this new evidence only underscores the dramatically diminished expectations within the
research community for the impact of civics instruction. Niemi and Junn (1998) have
analyzed the 1988 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) civics exam and
found that classroom instruction in civics (usually social studies courses) does correlate
with a higher score on the test, even when controlling for students’ demographic
characteristics known to affect academic performance.
Niemi and Junn’s conclusion that civics courses boost performance on a civics
exam is inarguably intuitive, but it is also indicative of the lowered expectations for the
study of civic education within the research community. Originally, scholars examining
the role of high school curricula sought to uncover how it nurtures such abstract ideals as
political tolerance and efficacy, and expected to find that it has a long-term impact well
beyond high school. Decades after those first studies bore little fruit, the best research on
the subject can merely conclude that taking a course with a civics component leads to a
higher score on a civics exam. Furthermore, the score is not even that much higher.
5
“[N]et of all the other influences, having had a civics or American government course in
twelfth grade gives a student a 2 percentage-point edge over someone whose last course
was earlier, and an additional 2 points over students who have had no civics courses”
(121). Jay Greene (2000) , however, has reanalyzed the same data and argues that of the
classroom factors in Niemi and Junn’s analysis, the only one that really matters is
whether the student was enrolled in a civics class at the time of the exam. In other words,
it would appear that we can have confidence in the conclusion that a high school
student’s grade on a civics test increases by, at most, four percentage points. But two of
those points result from being enrolled in a course with civics content at the time that the
student takes the test. While civics courses do appear to have an impact, it is modest at
best. For comparison’s sake, it is hard to believe that we would make much of finding
that scores on a chemistry exam increased by two percentage points when a student is
enrolled in a chemistry course. Rather than trumpet this as evidence that chemistry
classes are effective, we would probably wonder why the gain in test scores is so slight.
Given the central importance of school in the life of the typical adolescent, and
the historic mandate for schools to prepare their students for a lifetime of active and
engaged citizenship, could it really be that school experiences have such a limited effect
on students’ civic preparation? While it is perhaps natural to look first to a school’s
formal curriculum, this does not exhaust the ways in which schools can prepare their
students for a lifetime of active involvement in their communities. Another way that
schools provide a civic education is more subtle. Since a school is a community, it also
provides its students with experience as members of that community, preparing them for
6
membership in other, larger communities. In the words of a recent report on civic
education in America’s schools:
Schools are communities in which young people learn to interact, argue, and work
together with others, an important condition for future citizenship. Schools have
the capacity to bring together a heterogeneous population of young people – with
different backgrounds, perspectives, and vocational ambitions—to instruct them
in common lessons and values. They can also bring young people into significant
relationships with adult role models. (Carnegie Corporation and CIRCLE 2003)
To understand how, as communities, schools can lead young people to be civically
engaged, two inter-related points need to be made. First, an important impetus for voting
is a sense of civic obligation; turning out to vote is often a matter of adhering to a civic
norm. Second, it because they are communities that schools can inculcate civic norms
among their students.
Voting Out of Duty
I turn first to the importance of civic duty as a factor facilitating voter turnout.
The puzzle of why people turn out to vote and otherwise engage in the political process
has long been of interest to social scientists. Such engagement is a puzzle because, when
viewed in narrowly instrumental terms, it is difficult to explain why anyone would take
the effort to vote. In a paradox long-noted in the rational choice literature, the
infinitesimal chance that any individual voter could cast an election’s deciding vote
7
means that a cost-benefit analysis of voter turnout should always result in greater costs
than benefits (Downs 1957; Riker and Ordeshook 1968). The decision to vote must thus
have another motivation, which has been identified as a sense of civic obligation. Many
scholars working under different theoretical assumptions have come to a consensus that
civic duty is a primary motivation for political participation. That consensus, however, is
largely hidden, as civic duty is typically mentioned only in passing.1 A notable exception
is the work of Sidney Verba, Kay Schlozman, and Henry Brady, in their exhaustive study
of civic involvement. They asked Americans why they engage in an array of civic and
political activities, and found that an overwhelming percentage report doing so because
they feel it is their duty (Verba, Schlozman, and Brady 1995; Schlozman, Verba, and
Brady 1995). This is consistent with research stretching back at least the 1950s, which
found a connection between civic duty and political participation (Campbell et al. 1960).
Notwithstanding this scholarly consensus on the importance of civic duty, there is
a paucity of research on the subject. Ostensibly, scholars have ignored duty as an
explanation for political engagement on the grounds that it is tautological :“People vote
because they feel they should vote.” When our analysis is limited to individuals, it is
admittedly the case that asking people whether voting is a civic duty has a circular logic
to it. Complicating things further is the fear that the act of voting itself might very well
lead people to endorse voting as something virtuous citizens do (Ashenfelter and Kelley
1975). Stephen Knack, however, has argued that the way around this circularity is to
realize that civic norms are largely a collective phenomenon, and so understanding their
impact requires looking not to individuals’ sense of duty, but rather to the strength of
norms within their community (Knack 1992; Knack and Kropf 1998). As he explains,
1
For examples, see (Rosenstone and Hansen 1993; Teixeira 1992).
8
even people with a low sense of duty have a higher likelihood of voting in a place
populated with duty-bound compatriots, because “someone with a low sense of civic
obligation may nonetheless vote to avoid displeasing a friend or relative with a stronger
sense of duty” (1992, 137-38). What matters is not just whether a given individual has a
strong sense of duty, but also whether that individual is surrounded by others who have a
strong sense of duty.
Schools and Social Capital
Collectively-held norms, including civic norms of the type described by Knack,
are a form of social capital.2 Because this term is used in many various contexts across
different academic disciplines, it has unfortunately taken on numerous, sometimes
amorphous meanings. The early research on social capital, however, stressed that it
consists of the norms within a community which facilitate overcoming the dilemma of
collective action -- norms that are learned, spread, and enforced within social networks
(Coleman 1987, 1988, 1990; Putnam 1993).
Coleman notes that people act in accordance with social norms for one of two
reasons. One is external, and consists of social sanctions applied by others. The term
sanctions may seem vaguely sinister, but it refers to nothing more than the signals people
send to one another in everyday social interactions. These sanctions are typically subtle - a disapproving look, a raised eyebrow, the whispered label of “shirker” -- but are
nonetheless effectual (Knack 1992). They are also largely a matter of anticipated
reactions; I anticipate how my neighbors will perceive my behavior, and act to meet their
assumed approval (or avoid their disapproval). But sanctions need not only be applied
2
Indeed, James Coleman titled one his essays “Norms as Social Capital” (1987).
9
externally, by others. They can also be applied to oneself, as they come to be
internalized. Norm-induced behavior may begin as the product of externally-applied
social sanctions, but eventually be rooted in something other than social pressure. “An
individual comes to have an internal sanctioning system which provides punishment
when he carries out an action proscribed by the norm or fails to carry out an action
prescribed by the norm” (Coleman 1990, 293). While Coleman’ theory is general,
applying to many different norms, here our attention will focus on a civic-oriented norm,
one that encourages voting.
A particularly important period of life for the adoption of civic norms is
adolescence. And an especially important setting in which adolescents come to learn,
and thus adopt, norms is their school. This is why Coleman’s seminal work on social
capital centered on schools. If a school is a community, then we should expect that
schools characterized by strong civic norms foster engagement in the political process
among their students, both in the present and the future. Indeed, social capital theory
would suggest that schools are precisely the sort of social environment governed by
norms, as members of a school community spend a lot of time in close proximity to one
another.
We have seen that many people vote out of adherence to a civic norm, and that
schools are communities where civic norms are adopted. In tandem, these two claims
suggest that where you went to high school should affect whether or not you vote. I turn
next to testing that hypothesis.
10
The Data
Studying how the collective norms held within the high school you attend as an
adolescent might affect your electoral engagement as an adult requires data that
simultaneously meet two criteria. First, the study must be contextual. We require
measures, not only of individuals’ attitudes, behavior, and characteristics, but also the
characteristics of the social environment within their school. Second, the data must be
longitudinal. Adolescents interviewed in high school must be tracked into adulthood,
with follow-up interviews to determine their level of civic and political engagement. The
combination of both elements in a single dataset requires a considerable investment of
resources (not to mention a fair degree of patience, as the study must unfold over a
number of years). Fortunately, the Youth Studies Series (YSS) fits the bill. The YSS
began in 1965, when interviews were conducted with a representative sample of high
school seniors and their parents. In addition to the 1965 wave of the study, youth and
parents were then re-interviewed in 1973 and 1982, thus fulfilling the longitudinal
criterion.3 Importantly, in addition to interviews with adolescent panel members and
their parents in 1965, the study includes data gathered from a representative sample of
roughly 125 students in the senior class of each youth’s high school. For every question
asked of the individual students, it is thus possible to construct school-level measures for
their high schools, meeting the need for contextual data. For example, we can determine
whether an individual student intends to attend college, and from the aggregation of the
entire school sample, we can also estimate the percentage of students within that school
who plan on going to college.
3
Another wave of the study was conducted in 1997, but only a portion of that data (from the children of the
original adolescent panel members) has been released publicly.
11
The analysis that follows proceeds in three parts. First, I examine whether the
civic norms within a school affect whether adolescents anticipate being politically
engaged upon reaching adulthood. Next, I test the extent to which the anticipation of
being engaged comes to fruition with longitudinal data that track whether the high school
students of 1965 are voters in 1980. Do civic norms in adolescence affect voting in
adulthood? Third, I turn to exploring conditions which facilitate civic norms within a
school.
Looking Forward: Anticipated Participation
The challenge of studying the impact of social norms on any behavior is finding
an indicator of the norms within a community. The critical measure of the schools’ social
environment, therefore, is the degree to which the particular norm in question is
endorsed. In particular, the YSS makes it possible to gauge the civic norms within a high
school with a question that asked students: “what three things about a person are most
important in showing that he is a good citizen?” There were then shown a list of choices,
all designed to capture different dimensions of citizenship, including religious
involvement, adherence to the law, and a sense of privatism (or minding one’s own
business). For the purpose at hand, one relates directly to voter participation: “He votes in
elections.” The beauty of this measure is its simplicity. Also, since it relies on the
students’ initiative to identify voting as a component of good citizenship, it largely avoids
the problem of having most everyone reflexively endorse voting as a normative
expectation, as tends to happen when respondents are simply asked whether they think
voting is important. As a result, there is a considerable amount of variation in the
12
percentage of students in each high school who endorse voting as a component of good
citizenship, ranging from 46 to 85 percent across the seventy-seven schools from which
students were sampled (with a mean of 70 percent).4 I will refer to the percentage of
students in each school who link voting with good citizenship as the school’s civic
climate.
The central hypothesis is that the stronger the voting norm within a school – the
higher the percentage within a school who link voting and good citizenship – the greater
the degree of electoral engagement for any of the school’s individual students. I begin by
testing whether a school’s civic climate affects whether its students anticipate being
engaged later in life.5 In other words, young people in a civic climate that fosters
engagement as a civic duty should be more likely to envision themselves as active
participants in their communities upon reaching adulthood. Anticipated participation has
been measured straightforwardly, as respondents in the high school sample were asked,
“Looking ahead to the time when you are on your own, what about actual participation in
public affairs and politics? How active do you think you will be in these matters?” In
response, they had three choices: Not very active, somewhat active, very active.6
A question that asks about young people’s anticipated participation is an
interesting window into what they see as normative, and is just as much a guide to their
present state of mind than a reliable prediction of their future behavior. It is likely that, to
4
Ninety-seven schools were attended by members of the YSS student panel, meaning that contextual data
were collected for about 80 percent of the panel members’ schools.
5
Note that these data are limited to white respondents only. These data were collected in 1965, just as the
Voting Rights Act was beginning to be implemented, and so many African Americans were still deprived
of the vote. While there is much to be learned about the consequences of being politically socialized in an
era during which the right to vote was won for African Americans, that question is beyond the scope of the
current paper. Consequently, the analysis focuses on white respondents. Eight percent of the YSS sample
is “nonwhite” (the term used in the questionnaire), and thus omitted from this analysis.
6
The response options were actually listed in the opposite order on the questionnaire. This is the order in
which I have coded them.
13
an adolescent, a question which essentially says “will you be civically engaged in the
future?” is really asking “do you think people should be engaged?” Or, perhaps more
accurately, “do you think people like you should be engaged?”
The nested design of the YSS presents some statistical complexities, requiring a
modeling strategy that accounts for the fact that the observations are, by definition, not
independent of one another. The analysis thus employs hierarchical linear modeling
(HLM) (Raudenbush and Bryk 2002). A hierarchical estimation essentially consists of
multiple models, one for each level at which we have data. In this case, one level is the
individual, and the other is the school. The level-one model thus includes an array of
individual-level independent variables. The innovation of using a hierarchical model is
that it is possible to let the intercept of the individual, or level 1, model be a function of
the community, or level 2, variables. The resulting parameter estimates thus account for
the impact of individual and community variables simultaneously, although the resulting
parameter estimates are interpreted analogously to results from conventional linear
regression. Formally, the model is as follows:
Anticipated Engagementij = β0j + β1jParents’ Educationij + β2j Educational
Expectationsij + β3j Time in Communityij + β4j Genderij + β5j “Good Citizen
Votes”ij + rij
β0j = γ00 + γ01 Civic Climate + γ02 Mean Parents’ Education + γ03 Mean Time in
Community + γ04 Political Diversity + u0j
β1j = γ10 + u1j
14
β2j = γ20 + u2j
β3j = γ30 + u3j
β4j = γ40 + u4j
β5j = γ50 + u5j
In its essentials, the model tests whether adolescents surrounded by peers who
identify voting as a norm are more likely to envision themselves as active citizens. The
model thus includes a number of control variables, at both the individual and school
(aggregate) levels, which we would expect to be related to a school’s civic climate.
Perhaps most importantly, the model includes the mean level of education attained by
students’ parents, which serves to account for the general socioeconomic status of the
school’s population.7 The model further accounts for the average length of time that
students have lived in their community, as it is likely that civic norms are more likely to
be inculcated in places where people have deep roots (Coleman 1988).8 The model also
controls for the political diversity within the school population, owing to evidence that
greater diversity stimulates young people to be more engaged in politics (Gimpel, Lay,
7
The high school sample data was collected from students only. They were asked “how far did your
parents go in school?” with six options for each parent: (1) less than high school; (2) some high school (911 years); (3) completed high school; (4) some college; (5) completed college; (6) went beyond college.
For each student respondent, the mean level of parents’ education was calculated by simply averaging the
two responses (in the case of single parents, obviously there was no need for an average). The high school
sample includes a number of socioeconomic indicators, including the percentage of students who expect to
attend college. Their colinearity precludes including more than one. I have chosen parents’ education, but
essentially identical results are obtained with the others as well.
8
“How many years have you lived in this city (or town or rural area)? (1) 1 year or less; (2) 2 years; (3) 3
years; (4) 4-5 years; (5) 6-10 years; (6) 11-15 years; (7) 16 or more years, but not all my life; (8) All my
life.
15
and Schuknecht 2003).9 The mention of political diversity foreshadows a lengthier
discussion of its effects below.
At the individual level, controls include parents’ education as well as whether the
student plans on attending college.10 Just as at the aggregate level, the model accounts
for each individual’s residential stability. Owing to longstanding gender differences in
levels of engagement the model also controls for gender (with females assigned the value
of 1, males 0). Perhaps most critically, the degree to which each individual endorses
voting as a sign of good citizenship is also included in the equation. In other words, the
model isolates the impact of being surrounded by others who hold that voting is a norm
by controlling for the individual’s own sense of civic duty. All of the independent
variables have been coded on a 0-1 scale, allowing a rough comparison of their
magnitudes (that is, we can compare the impact of each independent variable on the
dependent variable as it varies across its entire range).11
Table 1 displays the results. We see that the control variables are a mixed bag.
Some behave as expected, while others do not. Both parents’ education and the
expectation of attending college have a positive impact on anticipated engagement, while
the length of time in the community has no impact. At the time these data were collected,
9
Student respondents were asked to identify their partisan affiliation as Republican, Democrat, or
Independent. By identifying each respondent as falling into one of these three categories, aggregate
political heterogeneity can be calculated using a Herfindahl Index, where a higher number represents a
greater degree of political heterogeneity. The specific formula for political heterogeneity is:
Political Diversity = 1 − ∑ h 2ps
p
Where p = partisan categories and s = school, and hps thus represents the degree of diversity in each
school.
10
At the individual level, these are not so highly correlated as to preclude entering them into the same
model.
11
Note that all of the continuous variables at levels 1 and 2 are grand mean-centered, a practice that is
consistent throughout the paper. This simply means that their coefficients are interpreted relative to the
overall mean for that variable.
16
female teens were less likely than their male counterparts to anticipate being civically
engaged. The mean number of years in the community has no effect, while the mean
level of parents’ education is unexpectedly negative (before reading too much into this
result one should remember that this is only upon controlling for a number of factors,
including the education level of the respondent’s own parents). Political diversity has no
statistically significant impact.
Our attention, however, is directed at the impact of civic duty. As expected,
adolescents who report that good citizens exercise their right to vote also report that they
anticipate being publicly engaged upon reaching adulthood. We can also see, however,
that there is an effect of being immersed in a civic duty-rich environment over and above
the individual’s own sense of civic obligation. In terms of its magnitude (0.171), it is on
par with educational expectations (0.185) and parents’ education (0.216), and far exceeds
the impact of gender (-0.034).
Looking Backward: The Long Reach of Adolescence
We have seen that being surrounded by peers who share the belief that voting is a
social norm leads adolescents to anticipate that they will participate in public affairs
when they reach adulthood. To the extent that social norms have an impact on behavior in
the here and now, this is to be expected – especially if adolescents’ reports of what they
will do in the future reflects their current perception of that activity’s normative value.
As discussed above, adolescence is an especially significant period of the life span for the
internalization of social norms. That is, the adoption of norms in adolescence affects not
only the present, but also the future. If a norm encouraging public engagement, namely
17
voting, is internalized in adolescence, we should see that the civic climate of a high
school reaches into adulthood to affect public engagement.
While these results suggest a link between norms in one’s youth and public
engagement as an adult, the evidence is hardly definitive. For one, we do not know
whether adolescents’ stated expectation that they will be politically engaged at some
unspecified point in the future actually translates into engagement in adulthood.
Consider the model of anticipated participation, therefore, to be only a warm-up for the
headline act: determining whether the anticipation of engagement in adolescence
corresponds to actual behavior in adulthood. Specifically, does the civic climate of one’s
high school affect the likelihood of turning out to vote in the years following high
school? Our inquiry will center on the second wave of follow-up interviews, conducted in
1982, which asked the study’s participants to report on whether they turned out in the
1980 presidential election, fifteen years following the panel members’ graduation from
high school.12
At the individual level, the model controls for education level, marital status,
gender, and length of time in one’s present community, all factors past research has
shown have a bearing on voter turnout (Wolfinger and Rosenstone 1980; Rosenstone and
Hansen 1993). In addition to these factors in the present, it is also important to pay
attention to the past. Since the home is a critical factor affecting an individual’s civic
development, it is important to control for the engagement level of students’ parents.
That is, students with participatory parents might be inclined to report that such
12
Overall, voter turnout in 1980 was typical for elections after 1968 (roughly 55 percent), although the
voting rate of participants in the YSS panel is higher (roughly 80 percent). The higher rate is due to a
combination of selection bias, panel attrition, over-reporting, and the fact that people of this age and
education level really do have a relatively highr rate of turnout.
18
engagement is an indication of good citizenship, and so three measures of parental
engagement have been included. First is an index of the parent’s level of political
activism.13 Another accounts for whether, in 1964, parents reported taking an “active
part” in “local or community affairs” or “anything of that kind” (coded as yes/no). The
third records whether the parent who participated in the study voted in the most recent
(1964) presidential election. Finally, the model also controls for whether the individual
explicitly endorsed voting as an essential component of good citizenship.14
In addition to individual level control variables, the model also includes
characteristics of the respondent’s high school. School-level controls include the mean
level of parents’ education, residential mobility, the aggregate level of anticipated
13
This is an additive index of six acts, based on responses to the following questionnaire item:
I have a list of some of the things that people do that help a party or candidate win an election. I
wonder if you could tell me whether you have done these things during any kind of public election
involving candidates or issues during the past ten years.
(1) Did you talk to any people and try to show them why they should vote one way or another?
(2) Did you go to any political meetings, rallies, dinners, or things like that?
(3) Did you do any other work for one of the parties, candidates, or issues?
(4) Do you belong to any political clubs or organizations?
(5) Did you wear a campaign button or put a campaign sticker on your car?
(6) Did you give any money or buy any tickets to help a party, candidate, or group pay campaign
expenses?
Note that these are primarily electoral in nature. Cronbach’s alpha = 0.78.
14
Note that members of the YSS panel received a slightly different, and thus more detailed, questionnaire
than the respondents in the larger cohort study. Whereas students in the high school sample were asked to
identify the elements of good citizenship from a pre-determined list, panel members were free to offer any
response they wished in an open-ended format. The resulting answers have been combined into a set of
discrete categories, one of which includes such responses as “voting,” and “exercising your right to vote.”
The advantage of this approach is that it captures what is on the “top of one’s head,” and thus undoubtedly
better reflects what adolescents consider to be normative than a set of responses provided to them on a
questionnaire To ensure that the model reflects what is held to be most important in a student’s selfdefinition of good citizenship, the variable records the students’ first response to the question (they could
identify up to four). Using this stringent measure of voting-as-a-norm, roughly 16 percent of students put
voting on the top of their list as essential for being a good citizen. The precise wording of the question is:
People have different ideas about what being a good citizen means. We’re interested in what you
think. How would you describe a good citizen in this country -- that is, what things about a
person are most important in showing that one is a good citizen?
Anyone who responded with “voting,” “votes,” “registers and votes,” or “should exercise right to vote” is
coded as believing that voting is an element of good citizenship. More precisely, this is category 22 in the
codebook for the 1965 portion of the YSS, which can be consulted for more details (Jennings, Markus, and
Niemi 1991).
19
participation, and political diversity within the school environment. Of course, for the
purpose of testing the impact of civic norms, the most significant school-level measure is
its civic climate, namely the percentage of students who view voting as an obligation of
citizenship. The dependent variable is binary – either the respondent voted in 1980 or not
– and so the model employs logistic regression adapted for hierarchical estimation.15
Table 2 displays the results.
As before, not all the control variables come out as anticipated. At the individual
level, more education equals a greater likelihood of turning out to vote, as does greater
residential stability, as well as being married. Women, however, are neither more nor
less likely to turn out than men. Among the influences from within the home during
15
A method of estimation appropriate for data that are both hierarchical and binary must be employed. To
accommodate these two demands, I use a hierarchical generalized linear model (HGLM). In its
fundamentals, HGLM is an extension of a hierarchical linear model (HLM). It differs in that the level 1
predicted value is transformed so that it falls within a specified interval using what is known as an identity
link function. In the case of a dichotomous dependent variable, HGLM employs a binomial sampling
model and a logit link function (Raudenbush and Bryk 2002). When employing HGLM, the analyst has a
choice of reporting two different types of results: unit-specific and population-average models. Unitspecific models are appropriate when the research question is centered on the causal processes within each
level 2 unit (in this case, schools), while population-average models estimate effects for the population as a
whole. The key difference between them is that the unit-specific model estimates a random effect for each
unit at level 2. Coefficients in a population-average model are interpreted as the impact averaged over all
the units (Raudenbush et al. 2001). In this case, the research question at hand is better addressed with a
population-average model, since our interest is not in any particular school. It also the case that populationaverage models are less sensitive to model specification, meaning that their results are more robust
(although slightly less precise) than unit-specific models.
Formally, the model is as follows:
Voter Turnoutij = β0j + β1j Educationij + β2j Marriedij + β3j Time in Communityij + β4j Genderij +
β5j “Good Citizen Votes” (1965) ij + β6j Parent’s Electoral Activismij + β7j Parent’s Community
Voluntarismij + β8j Parents Were Votersij + rij
β0j = γ00 + γ01 Civic Climate + γ02 Mean Parents’ Education + γ03 Mean Time in Community + γ04
Political Diversity + u0j
β1j = γ10 + u1j
β2j = γ20 + u2j
β3j = γ30 + u3j
β4j = γ40 + u4j
β5j = γ50 + u5j
β6j = γ60 + u6j
β7j = γ70 + u7j
β8j = γ80 + u8j
20
adolescence, only parents’ electoral activism has an impact on voter turnout (positive, as
hypothesized). Among the influences from within one’s high school, the average level of
parents’ education does not have any long-term impact. Surprisingly, the level of
anticipated participation among high school peers has a negative, if slight, impact on
voting a decade and a half after high school. Some empirical support for the significance
of civic norms in high school can be found in the fact that greater residential stability
among the high school population in 1965 is a positive predictor of voting in 1980, given
that rootedness was a factor explicitly identified by Coleman as a facilitator of social
capital. Once again, we see that political diversity has no impact.
What about the measures of civic norms themselves? Does attending a high
school where voting is widely recognized as a social norm have a positive impact on
voter turnout fifteen years following high school? It does, as shown in Table 2.
Furthermore, an individual’s own belief that voting characterizes good citizenship as an
adolescent does not have a statistically significant impact when the school’s civic climate
is taken into account (although it does have a positive, statistically significant link to
voting when included in a model without the school-level factors, results not shown).
When translated into substantive terms, we see that the impact of high school civic
climate on voter turnout ranks with other factors in the model.16 Holding the other
variables constant at their means, a shift in civic climate from its minimum to maximum
value boosts the probability of voting by 14 percentage points, which is just shy of
16
In other words, I have estimated the probability of voting by multiplying the coefficients in the model by
reasonable values for the variables they represent. In this case, I have opted to vary civic climate from its
minimum to maximum value. Selecting a more restricted range would reduce its absolute impact on the
likelihood of voting, but not its impact relative to other variables.
21
residential stability (16 points) and having a college education (18 points). Significantly,
it even slightly exceeds the value of parental political activism (12 points).17
Cohesiveness
Finding that civic norms in high school lead to voter turnout years later leads
naturally to the question of what conditions facilitate civic norms within a school. Myriad
possibilities present themselves, most of which are beyond the scope of these data to test.
The social capital literature, however, leads us to one possibility that can be tested.
Recall that in Coleman’s seminal work on social capital, he was concerned with social
norms within a community. Norms are enforced where a critical mass of individuals
have arrived at a consensus over what is normative, which is more likely where values-what political scientists are more likely to call interests, and economists preferences—are
widely shared. In other words social norms, including a civic norm encouraging voting,
are expected to be stronger in cohesive communities. Increasingly, scholars have begun
to examine whether social cohesiveness facilitates numerous measures of social capital,
including membership in voluntary associations and social trust. One recent essay
reviewing fifteen such papers concludes that all of them tell the same story: homogeneity
fosters social capital (Costa and Kahn 2003). Or, to put it more provocatively, diversity
diminishes social capital.
Recall that the theoretical link between cohesiveness and social capital, in this
case civic norms, is that members of cohesive communities have widely shared values.
Given that, it is amazing that the existing research has found a signal amidst the noise of
17
An alternative way of gauging the impact of an independent variable is to vary its range from one
standard deviation above to one below its mean. When civic climate varies across that range, it boosts
turnout by 7 percentage points.
22
the diversity measures that have been typically been employed. For the most part, these
measures have been limited to the usual suspects in most sociological analysis: race,
ethnicity, and income. While these demographic measures have some intuitive appeal,
they are, at best, crude proxies for individuals’ values. Consider the following thought
experiment. Imagine that you were asked to predict whether two randomly selected
people had similar opinions on a particular issue. You can only know one thing about
them, and you do not know ahead of time the specific issue. What is the one thing that
you would want to know about them? I might suggest that more than their ethnic group,
income level, and even their race, you would do well to find out their partisanship (that
is, whether they identify as a Republican or a Democrat), as this is the single best
predictor of preferences across a wide range of issues. Political opinions, as captured by
partisanship, are an even better predictor than race, which is undeniably a salient factor in
American politics (Kinder and Sanders 1996). While race certainly shapes much of
American politics, a measure of racial heterogeneity at the community level will not
necessarily reflect the racial divide. This is because whites’ opinions are not simply the
inverse of those held by African-Americans. For example, while African Americans
consistently favor liberal economic policies, whites’ opinions are not uniformly
conservative.
Presumably, it is not terribly controversial to argue that partisanship is an
important predictor of Americans’ opinions. However, for many, perhaps most,
Americans the partisanship of their friends and acquaintances is not something which
occupies much of their attention. Americans are not likely to ask one another about their
partisan preferences or political ideology in casual conversation—a fact that is especially
23
true for adolescents. This might suggest, therefore, that the partisan composition of a
community is not terribly relevant for the process by which social norms are reinforced.
Is partisanship really a salient social marker? The answer lies in what partisanship is
really measuring. In the United States partisanship is actually a good proxy for one’s
cultural outlook, which in turn corresponds to a bundle of issue preferences. You may not
know whether your neighbors are Republicans, but you are likely to know something
about their lifestyle. People who have similar lifestyles are, in turn, likely to form
networks of reciprocity with one another. Partisanship, in other words, is an important if
subtle social identity (Green, Palmquist, and Shickler 2002). Therefore, even though
high school students are unlikely to identify each other by partisan labels, they are likely
to differentiate among their peers on the basis of other criteria – economic class, career
path, religious affiliation, etc. – which are related to partisanship. In other words, all of
the demographic measures that researchers have employed are proxies for opinions,
preferences, and values. I am merely suggesting that, on average, political partisanship is
a better proxy than the demographics that have been used in previous research.
The hypothesized link between partisan cohesiveness and civic norms need not
remain a theoretical proposition, however, as it is amenable to empirical examination. To
that end, Table 3 displays a model which tests whether political diversity is related to the
civic climate of a high school. In this case, the unit of analysis is the school, so the
dependent variable is the percentage of students in the school who endorse voting as a
component of good citizenship, while the independent variables are also measured at the
school level. In addition to the degree of political diversity within the school, the model
also tests whether two other dimensions of heterogeneity, racial and religious, have any
24
impact on the prevalence of a norm encouraging voting.18 As mentioned, race has been
examined in previous research. Religion has largely been absent from the research
agenda, but like partisanship is also a plausible proxy for students’ worldview. (It is not
possible to include measures of ethnic or income heterogeneity, the other two dimensions
typically used).
Importantly, the model also accounts for other factors that we would expect to
impact a school’s civic climate. Perhaps most importantly, the model includes the mean
level of education attained by students’ parents, which serves to account for the general
socioeconomic status of the school’s population.19 The model further accounts for the
average length of time that students have lived in their community, as it is likely that
civic norms are more likely to be inculcated in places where people have deep roots.20
All variables are coded on a 0-1 scale, allowing a rough comparison of their magnitudes
(that is, we can compare the impact of each independent variable on the dependent
variable as it varies across its entire range).
<Insert Table 3>
18
Religious cohesiveness is calculated in a manner comparable to political heterogeneity. Religious
categories are (1) Roman Catholic; (2) Mainline Protestant (Presbyterian, Lutheran, Episcopalian, and
Methodist); (3) Conservative Protestant (Baptist, Disciples of Christ, Church of Christ); (4) Mormon; (5)
Jewish; (6) Eastern Orthodox; and (7) no religious preference. Racial cohesiveness is simply the
percentage of nonwhite students in the school, since the questionnaire only asked students to identify
themselves as white or nonwhite, precluding the use of an index comparable to the political and religious
indices. The questionnaire did not inquire about parents’ income, and so income heterogeneity has not been
included in this analysis.
19
The high school sample data was collected from students only. They were asked “how far did your
parents go in school?” with six options for each parent: (1) less than high school; (2) some high school (911 years); (3) completed high school; (4) some college; (5) completed college; (6) went beyond college.
For each student respondent, the mean level of parents’ education was calculated by simply averaging the
two responses (in the case of single parents, obviously there was no need for an average). The high school
sample includes a number of socioeconomic indicators, including the percentage of students who expect to
attend college. Their colinearity precludes including more than one. I have chosen parents’ education, but
essentially identical results are obtained with the others as well.
20
“How many years have you lived in this city (or town or rural area)? (1) 1 year or less; (2) 2 years; (3) 3
years; (4) 4-5 years; (5) 6-10 years; (6) 11-15 years; (7) 16 or more years, but not all my life; (8) All my
life.
25
As hypothesized, the more politically cohesive, or homogeneous, the environment
within a high school, the stronger the norm linking voting with being a good citizen. We
also see that the substantive magnitude of political cohesiveness’s impact (0.10) is
comparable to the impact of parents’ education (0.14), which is noteworthy given that
education and the status it confers has long been recognized as a major facilitator of
social norms generally, and civic engagement especially.21 It is important to stress it is
political cohesiveness which has an impact on the civic character of a community; neither
religious nor racial heterogeneity reach statistical significance.22 I take up the
significance of that finding in the concluding section of the paper.
Conclusion
The bottom line of this analysis is that we have seen how the civic climate of
one’s high school has an impact on voter turnout at least fifteen years following high
school. However, the pithiness of this statement perhaps obscures its full significance.
First, we have seen that it is the civic climate of the school community that has a robust
impact on participation in adulthood, not the degree to which an adolescent’s peers see
themselves as active in public affairs. What matters is that an adolescent’s environment is
populated with a high percentage of peers who express that voting is an indicator of good
citizenship -- that it is a civic duty. A high school context characterized by adolescents
who are politically engaged, and anticipate being so in the future, has no similar effect.
Second, we have seen that it is the norms within the adolescent’s community, defined in
this case as the high school, that matter. In fact, once we account for environmental
factors, an individual’s own belief that voting is a civic duty does not have an impact on
21
22
Surprisingly, the aggregate level of residential mobility is a positive predictor of civic norms.
Results from an individual-level hierarchical model are substantively identical (results not shown).
26
voting as an adult. We are thus reminded that individual level factors are only part of the
story explaining participation, and political behavior more generally. While most social
scientists recognize the hazards of inferring individual-level behavior from aggregate
data, it can also be the case that inferring individual-level behavior without information
about individuals’ social contexts is equally fallacious (Huckfeldt and Sprague 1993).
Individuals do not act, nor are they acted upon, in isolation. Rather, norms are inculcated
within communities, such as the family, the neighborhood, and – as we have seen -- the
school. Third, strong civic norms within a school community reach into the future.
Where you were then affects what you do now.
We have also seen that, consistent with the theoretical underpinnings of the social
capital literature, cohesive schools foster civic norms. These results stand apart from the
extant literature, however, because they demonstrate that the political composition of a
school has singular significance. I am the first to admit that this is an explosive finding—
diversity, at least along a political dimension, dampens civic norms. A naïve reading of
the results presented above might lead one to conclude that the cure for America’s civic
ills lies in crafting clusters of political homogeneity, with conservatives shunted off to
their schools and liberals to theirs. Such a conclusion would be dead-wrong, however.
Remember that political cohesiveness has no discernable impact on adolescents’ political
engagement in models that also account for the civic climate within the school. Given
that the model predicting civic norms (Table 3) explains only a modest amount of
variance, this should not be surprising.
A more sensible conclusion to draw from these results is that any school-based
reform with the objective of enhancing voter turnout among the rising generation should
27
focus on ways to foster civic norms, and that the importance of political cohesiveness
provides a clue regarding what needs to happen for civic norms to be strengthened.
Political cohesiveness (or any other similar measure of cohesiveness, like ethnicity, race,
income, and religion) is merely a proxy for values held in common within a community.
A promising course of action to foster civic norms, therefore, is to identify ways to foster
a sense of commonality among students a school’s students. At this point, I am not
suggesting that the means for fostering a sense of commonality is clear. Rather, I submit
that the suggestive evidence presented here points us in the direction for future research.
We need to learn how schools can foster cohesiveness, linked to a sense of civic
obligation among their students.
With these data, we are not able to determine precisely what should be done, but
they do suggest what we should be looking for: ways to thicken civic norms. At this
point, it would be premature to advocate a single silver bullet as the way to strengthen the
civic commitment of today’s youth, as we know little about the process of civic
development among adolescents. Americans have largely forgotten our schools’ civic
mission, and so little effort is expended in evaluating whether they are accomplishing that
mission. Therefore, the first order of business must simply be recognition among
legislators, educators, parents and the public alike that the civic dimension of our
educational system deserves more than lip service, but should be subject to the same
scrutiny as other educational outcomes. Schools will only take civic education seriously
when policymakers and parents begin to pay attention to the civic experiences provided
by their schools as closely as they currently monitor academic performance. I echo
Stephen Macedo’s lament: “Given the centrality of civic purposes to public schools it is
28
ironic that studies of ‘effective schools’ pay so little attention to civic ends” (2000, 235).
We need to learn what works, and then make it possible for our schools to do it.
It is fair to ask whether the observed results for a school’s civic climate are really
owing to the environment within the school, or whether they simply reflect the wider
community in which the school is located. With the existing data, it is impossible to
disentangle the norms within the community from those within the school. However,
whatever the balance between the two, contemporary schools hold the potential to be
agents of change. For example, public health experts have found that norms regarding
binge drinking and smoking can be altered on high school campuses (Perkins 2003).
Perhaps similar methods can be used to bolster civic norms. Regardless of whether the
same, or different, methods turn out to be effective for enhancing civic norms, the
evidence suggests that schools can make a difference.
Further strengthening the case for schools to emphasize civic norms, we already
know that it is possible for schools to foster one type of civic involvement, namely
community volunteering. Involvement in community service among American youth is
up in recent years, largely because of efforts in the schools. While some of this
volunteering is done for purely for self-interested reasons like enhancing a resume or
college application, much of it is also motivated by altruism (Hodgkinson and Weitzman
1997). Some observers are critical of community service for promoting withdrawal from
engagement with politics (Galston 2001) but I prefer to view its rise as a hopeful sign that
our schools can affect whether young people are engaged in their communities. That
said, promoting community service does not necessarily foster a climate in which
engagement in politics, particularly voting, is seen as an obligation of citizenship.
29
Is it really possible to expect today’s schools, beleaguered as many of them are, to
add the promotion of civic duty to their long list of responsibilities? I believe that it is,
and that a model can be found in the way that contemporary schools have come to
embrace tolerance for diversity as a preeminent value. Arthur Powell, Eleanor Farrar, and
David Cohen make this point well in The Shopping Mall High School, as they describe
what they observed across many different public schools. I thus quote them at length.
The one theme that schools can rally around is tolerating differences. . . In school
after school, all members of the community spoke with pride and feeling about
the growth of tolerance. . . [D]iscussions of tolerance most frequently concerned
racial harmony. Several schools had recently undergone traumas of actual or
potential racial discord and had expended considerable emotional and financial
resources on that issue. For many teachers the struggle had been the high point of
their careers. They were proud of the results: “Here we give kids a really
beautiful social education. No one can beat us at that.” When racial or ethnic
slurs occurred within classrooms, teachers virtually never ignored them. They
pounced on them as educational opportunities. . . .
In a curiously American, wholly noble, and completely exhausting way,
the tolerance of diversity has become the basis for community within high
schools. It is not easy to build community on the basis of differences rather than
similarities; it goes against the expected grain. . . But the schools settle for the
absence of conflict as the definition of community. Community means an attitude
30
of “Live and let live” rather than of people working together. (Powell, Farrar, and
Cohen 1985, 57-58)
Note how Powell and his colleagues describe the spontaneous way that teachers stress
tolerance when derogatory comments are made in their classrooms. This respect for
differences has not come about through a particular class that students take, nor is it
restricted to a select few who participate in a specific program. It has become part of the
modern public school’s culture, quietly and consistently reinforced by teachers and
administrators. It has, in other words, become a norm.
Tolerance for diversity is a noble objective, and America’s educators should be
applauded for having successfully integrated it into the educational experience of today’s
students. However, while tolerance is necessary for a vibrant democratic culture, it is not
sufficient. A sense of civic duty is also needed. Unfortunately, the importance of
inculcating civic responsibility seems lost on most observers who advocate renewed
attention to civic education. To take just one example, a recent article by Walter Parker
in Phi Delta Kappan (2005) calls for bolstering the civic education offered by our
schools –a cause I certainly endorse – but at no point discusses the need to teach young
people that citizenship goes beyond embracing diversity, and also includes an
appreciation for the sense of shared civic responsibilities that accompany citizenship.
I propose that we consider the way tolerance has become a norm to be a template
for a renewed focus on encouraging a sense of civic duty among today’s adolescents.
Our schools need to re-emphasize America’s shared civic culture, not to replace but
complement encouraging tolerance. Let educators do for unum what they have done for
31
pluribus. In this regard, we can draw a useful parallel to Robert Putnam’s distinction
between bonding and bridging social capital. Recall that social capital refers to the
presence of norms, taught and enforced within social networks. As Putnam defines them,
the bonding variety consists of relationships among people with whom you have much in
common, whereas bridging social capital is characterized by connections across social
groups. Putnam stresses that both types of social capital are essential to a healthy civil
society. Our schools have come to excel at building bridges; perhaps they should also be
forging bonds by encouraging students of all races, ethnicities, classes, and political
backgrounds to see themselves as bound together in a single community. To do so is
simply a return to the raison d’etre of the public, or common, school as it was originally
conceived-- to create a shared civic culture within a highly heterogeneous society.
I close by observing that against a backdrop of general ignorance and apathy
regarding civic and political matters among America’s young people, there is one notable
exception. Today’s youth are extremely fluent in the rights that protect people living in
the United States (Galston 2001). Our schools have an opportunity, even an obligation, to
assist in reversing the decline in civic engagement among young people, by providing an
environment where they become equally fluent in the responsibilities of citizenship.
32
References
Ashenfelter, Orley, and Stanley Kelley. 1975. Determinants of Participation in
Presidential Elections. Journal of Law and Economics 18:695-733.
Beck, Paul Allen, and M. Kent Jennings. 1982. Pathways to Participation. American
Political Science Review 76 (1):94-108.
Campbell, Andrea Louise. 2003. How Policies Make Citizens: Senior Political Activism
and the American Welfare State. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Campbell, Angus, Philip E. Converse, Warren E. Miller, and Donald E. Stokes. 1960.
The American Voter. New York: John Wiley and Sons.
Carnegie Corporation and CIRCLE. 2003. The Civic Mission of Schools: Available at
www.civicmissionofschools.org.
Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. 2004. Turnout
of Under-25 Voters Up Sharply:
http://www.civicyouth.org/PopUps/Release_1824final.pdf.
Coleman, James S. 1987. Norms as Social Capital. In Economic Imperialism: The
Economic Approach Applied Outside the Field of Economics, edited by Gerard
Radnitzky and Peter Bernholz. New York: Paragon House Publishers.
———. 1988. Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital. American Journal of
Sociology 94 (Supplement):S95-S120.
———. 1990. Foundations of Social Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Conover, Pamela Johnston, and Donald D. Searing. 2000. A Political Socialization
Perspective. In Rediscovering the Democratic Purposes of Education, edited by
Lorraine M. McDonnell, P. Michael Timpane and Roger Benjamin. Lawrence,
KS: University Press of Kansas.
Costa, Dora L., and Matthew E. Kahn. 2003. Civic Engagement and Community
Heterogeneity: An Economist's Perspective. Perspectives on Politics 1 (1):103111.
Downs, Anthony. 1957. An Economic Theory of Democracy. New York: Harper and
Brothers.
Galston, William A. 2001. Political Knowledge, Political Engagement, and Civic
Education. Annual Review of Political Science 4:217-234.
33
Gimpel, James G., J. Celeste Lay, and Jason E. Schuknecht. 2003. Cultivating
Democracy: Civic Environments and Political Socialization in America.
Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.
Green, Donald, Bradley Palmquist, and Eric Shickler. 2002. Partisan Hearts and Minds:
Political Parties and the Social Identities of Voters. New Haven: Yale University
Press.
Greene, Jay P. 2000. Review of Civic Education: What Makes Students Learn. Social
Science Quarterly 81:696-97.
Hodgkinson, Virginia A., and Murray S. Weitzman. 1997. Volunteering and Giving
Among Teenagers 12 to 17 Years of Age: Findings From a National Survey.
Washington, DC: Independent Sector.
Huckfeldt, Robert, and John Sprague. 1993. Citizens, Contexts, and Politics. In Political
Science: The State of the Discipline II, edited by Ada W. Finifter. Washington:
American Political Science Association.
Jennings, M. Kent, Gregory B. Markus, and Richard G. Niemi. 1991. Youth-Parent
Socialization Panel Study, 1965-1982: Wave III Codebook. Ann Arbor, MI: InterUniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research.
Kinder, Donald R., and Lynn M. Sanders. 1996. Divided by Color: Racial Politics and
Democratic Ideals. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Knack, Stephen. 1992. Civic Norms, Social Sanctions, and Voter Turnout. Rationality
and Society 4 (2):133-56.
Knack, Stephen, and Martha E. Kropf. 1998. For Shame! The Effect of Community
Cooperative Context on the Probability of Voting. Political Psychology 19
(3):585-99.
Levine, Peter, and Mark Hugo Lopez. 2002. Youth Voting Has Declined, By Any
Measure. College Park: Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning
and Engagement.
Macedo, Stephen. 2000. Diversity and Distrust: Civic Education in a Multicultural
Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Merriam, Charles. 1934. Civic Education in the United States. New York: Scribner's
Sons.
Merriam, Charles E. 1931. The Making of Citizens: A Comparative Study of Methods of
Civic Training. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
34
Miller, Warren E., and J. Merrill Shanks. 1996. The New American Voter. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Niemi, Richard G., and Jane Junn. 1998. Civic Education: What Makes Students Learn.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Parker, Walter C. 2005. Teaching Against Idiocy. Phi Delta Kappan, January, 344-351.
Perkins, H. Wesley, ed. 2003. The Social Norms Approach to Preventing School and
College Age Substance Abuse: A Handbook for Educators, Counselors, and
Clinicians. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Powell, Arthur G., Eleanor Farrar, and David K. Cohen. 1985. The Shopping Mall High
School: Winners and Losers in the Educational Marketplace. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin.
Putnam, Robert D. 1993. Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
———. 2000. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New
York: Simon and Schuster.
Raudenbush, Stephen W., and Anthony S. Bryk. 2002. Hierarchical Linear Models:
Applications and Data Analysis Methods. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Raudenbush, Stephen W., Anthony S. Bryk, Yuk Fai Cheong, and Jr. Richard T.
Congdon. 2001. HLM 5: Hierarchical Linear and Nonlinear Modeling.
Lincolnwood, IL: Scientific Software International.
Riker, William, and Peter C. Ordeshook. 1968. A Theory of the Calculus of Voting.
American Political Science Review 62:25-42.
Rosenstone, Steven J., and John Mark Hansen. 1993. Mobilization, Participation, and
Democracy in America. New York: Macmillan.
Schlozman, Kay Lehman, Sidney Verba, and Henry E. Brady. 1995. Participation's Not a
Paradox: The View from American Activists. British Journal of Political Science
25 (1):1-36.
Teixeira, Ruy A. 1992. The Disappearing American Voter. Washington, DC: Brookings
Institution Press.
Verba, Sidney, Kay Lehman Schlozman, and Henry E. Brady. 1995. Voice and Equality:
Civic Voluntarism in American Politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
35
Wolfinger, Raymond E., and Steven J. Rosenstone. 1980. Who Votes? New Haven: Yale
University Press.
36
Table 1. Civic Climate and Anticipated Engagement
Results from hierarchical linear model
Civic Climate
0.171*** (0.067)
Level 1 Effects
Good citizen votes
0.072*** (0.010)
Educational expectations
0.185*** (0.012)
Parents’ education
0.216*** (0.023)
Years lived in community
-0.006 (0.026)
Female
-0.034*** (0.010)
Level 2 Effects (School)
Mean parents’ education
-0.270** (0.071)
Mean years lived in community
0.060 (0.061)
Political diversity
-0.025 (0.058)
Constant
1.779*** (0.015)
Deviance
36652.705
Number of Level 1 Units
16625
Number of Level 2 Units
76
Robust standard errors in parentheses
* significant at .10; ** significant at .05; *** significant at .01
Source: Youth Studies Series
37
Table 2. High School Civic Climate and Voter Turnout in 1980
Results from hierarchical generalized linear model
(population-average model)
Civic Climate (1965)
(1)
1.033** ( 0.466)
Level 1 Effects
“Good Citizen Votes” (1965)
0.152 ( 0.229)
Education level
1.041*** (0.252)
Married
0.699***( 0.219)
Female
-0.020 (0.154)
Years lived in community
0.829*** (0.256)
Parental Participation (also level 1)
Electoral Activism Index (1965)
0.774** (0.303)
Community Voluntarism (1965)
0.135 (0.134)
Parents were voters
0.241 (0.231)
Level 2 Effects (School)
Mean parents’ education
0.527 (0.539)
Mean years lived in community
1.135*** (0.405)
Mean anticipated participation
-0.937* (0.518)
Political diversity
-0.091 (0.251)
Constant
0.469* (0.256)
Number of Level 1 Units
567
Number of Level 2 Units
70
Robust standard errors in parentheses
* significant at .10; ** significant at .05; *** significant at .01
Source: Youth Studies Series
38
Table 3. Political Heterogeneity and Civic Climate
(Percentage of students who indicate that voting is an essential component of good citizenship)
Results from linear regression
Heterogeneity
Political diversity
-0.100** (0.045)
Religious diversity
0.053 (0.040)
Racial diversity
-0.029 (0.044)
Other Demographics
Mean parents' education
0.143** (0.055)
Years lived in community
-0.074* (0.043)
Constant
0.739*** (0.051)
Observations
Adjusted R2
77
0.13
Standard errors in parentheses
* significant at .10; ** significant at .05; *** significant at .01
Source: Youth Studies Series
39