Civic Education and the Mobilization of Political Participation in Developing Democracies Steven E. Finkel Department of Government and Foreign Affairs University of Virginia [email protected] Paper prepared for the conference, “Political Participation: Building a Research Agenda,” Princeton University, October 12-14, 2000. I thank Gwendolyn Bevis, Harry Blair, Larry Cooley, Paul Freedman, Gary Hansen, James Gibson, Amanda Gouws, Robert Mattes, Chris Sabatini, Lynn Sanders, and Sheryl Stumbras for advice, comments, criticisms, and assistance with this project. Abstract This paper examines the effect of adult civic education programs on political participation in two developing democracies, the Dominican Republic and South Africa, on the core democratic value of political tolerance. I first develop hypotheses about the effects of civic education on participation from theories of political culture and recent work on recruitment and group mobilization. Using survey data collected on participants in numerous civic education programs as well as control groups in both countries, I then show that civic education has significant and substantively meaningful effects on locallevel political participation in four of the seven programs studied in South Africa and the Dominican Republic, and that the results hold after controlling for potential biases related to the individual’s selfselection into the programs. Moreover, the effects of civic education on participation are largely conditional in nature, dependent on variables such as the frequency and nature of the civic education “treatment,” and the individual’s store of prior political and participatory resources. The results suggest that civic education and other group mobilization processes are highly complementary in both countries; civic education training stimulates individual political behavior in much the same way as does participation in other kinds of secondary group activities. I discuss the implications of these findings for the development of democratic political culture and for more practical considerations in the implementation of civic education programs in democratizing contexts in the future. 2 Introduction Can individuals in emerging democracies learn democratic values, skills, and participatory orientations through civic education? Presumably the United States and many West European countries believe the answer to be yes, since they have devoted considerable resources over the past several decades to civic education as part of their larger efforts to provide democracy assistance and strengthen civil society in emerging democracies around the world (Carothers 1996; 1999; Diamond 1995; Quigley 1997). As Quigley (1997, 564) notes, there are now a “plethora of public and private international actors involved in these efforts .... [including]...most multilateral organizations, regional development banks, major bilateral assistance programs, as well as literally thousands of non-governmental organizations.” Some of these activities center around the training of lawyers, journalists and other social elites in the rule of law, in assisting constitutional reform, and in strengthening democratic political parties and other elements of a country’s newly emerging civil society. Some activities, however, are aimed more directly at the mass level. Indeed, USAID’s own strategic framework states explicitly that it seeks to “strengthen democratic political culture,” to promote “acceptance by both citizens and political elites of a shared system of democratic norms and values,” and to encourage citizens “to obtain knowledge about their system of government and act upon their values by participating in the political and policy process” (USAID Democracy Strategic Framework 1998). To this end, USAID and other donors have sponsored numerous programs directed explicitly at promoting support for democratic norms, values, and behaviors among ordinary citizens. These efforts constitute “civic education programs,” and range from the adoption of new curricula in primary and secondary schools to teach young people about democracy, to programs that provide instruction about the social and political rights of women, to voter education programs, to neighborhood problem-solving programs that bring individuals in contact with local authorities for purposes of promoting collective action to benefit local communities. Surprisingly, until recently little effort has been made to assess the impact of civic education programs on their target populations. There is an extensive literature on the effectiveness of school-based 3 civics education among children and young adults (e.g. Ichilov 1990; Jennings and Niemi 1974; Morduchowicz, Catterberg, Niemi and Bell 1996; Niemi and Junn 1998; Slomcynski and Shabad 1999; Torney-Purta, Schwille, and Amadeo 1999; Torney, Oppenheim and Farmer 1975). Among adult programs, however, nearly all evaluations of civic education have looked exclusively at implementation and management issues such as the numbers of people trained, the quality of teachers and trainers, the quality of materials and whether the programs achieved their stated organizational goals (e.g. USAID 1992, 1989). Only in the last several years have efforts begun to evaluate the impact of civic education on the democratic values, attitudes and activities of ordinary citizens who take part in these programs (Bratton et al. 1999; Finkel et al., 1998, 2000; Finkel 2000). In this paper I assess the effects of adult civic education programs on political participation. Recent research documents the extremely low levels of social and political participation in many developing democracies (e.g. Booth and Richard 1998; Bratton 1999), so such an investigation has the important practical goal of illuminating whether civic education is a promising means for stimulating greater citizen engagement in the political process. Moreover, the results can uncover the conditions under which civic education is most (and least) effective, thereby providing critical information to policy-makers and donors regarding the kinds of programs and methods that appear to be most capable of influencing ordinary individuals to take part in politics. Aside from these obvious practical concerns, however, examining the effect of civic education on political participation has several more general theoretical aims. First, the results can shed light on the extent to which democratic values and behaviors can be affected at all by short-term stimuli, as opposed to changing more slowly due to long-term economic modernization, generational change, the activities of political parties and governmental actors, and the gradual diffusion of democratic norms and ideals through the international mass media (Almond and Verba 1963; Eckstein 1988; Gibson et al 1992;Weil 1989). A growing body of literature suggests that democratic political orientations are more susceptible to influence from short-term economic, political, and experiential factors than traditional models of socialization and democratic change allowed (Dalton 1994; Evans and Whitefield 1995; Reisinger et al 4 1994; Rose, Mishler, and Haerpfer 1998; Weil 1993). A finding that civic education can directly influence political participation would lend significant support to the view that democratic political culture in general is susceptible to short-term influence. And such changes may then at least partially be within the reach of active efforts at manipulation by governments, political elites, or international actors. Second, the examination of the civic education-participation relationship can provide an important extension of recent theories that stress the role of group memberships, mobilization and recruitment in determining mass political action in developing democracies (McDonough et al. 1998; Booth and Richard 1998; Bratton 1999). As opposed to the formal, classroom-based civics training that students receive in school systems throughout advanced as well as developing democracies, adult civic education in most democratizing contexts is conducted almost exclusively through secondary group associations. Hence the investigation of civic education’s effect on political participation provides a means of assessing the ways that the participatory appeals contained in democratic civics curricula are reinforced and amplified by other group-related mobilization processes. In this paper, I present the findings from two studies designed to evaluate civic education programs in the Dominican Republic and South Africa.1 The project was conducted over the last three years under the auspices of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and Management Systems International, a Washington-based consulting firm. Using survey data collected on participants in numerous civic education programs as well as control groups in both countries, I show that civic education has significant and substantively meaningful effects on local-level political participation in four of the seven programs studied in South Africa and the Dominican Republic, and that the results hold after controlling for potential biases related to the individual’s self-selection into the programs. Moreover, the effects of civic education on participation are largely conditional in nature, dependent on theoretically relevant variables such as the frequency and nature of the civic education “treatment,” and the individual’s store of prior political and participatory resources. The results suggest that civic 1 A third country, Poland, was also included in the first study. Basic findings from the Polish analysis can be found in Finkel et al. (1998) and Sabatini et al. (1998). 5 education and other group mobilization processes are highly complementary in both countries; civic education training stimulates individual political behavior in much the same way as does participation in other kinds of secondary group activities. I discuss the implications of these findings for theories of the development of democratic political culture, and for more practical considerations in the implementation of civic education programs in democratizing contexts in the future. Civic Education and the Mobilization of Political Participation: Theoretical Perspectives How much impact on a political participation are civic education programs likely to have? According to traditional views that root participation in the individual’s social-structural location, or in basic attitudinal orientations acquired from a country’s political culture, the answer would appear to be very little. On these views, change in democratic political culture should occur very slowly, primarily in response to structural factors such as economic modernization (e.g. Lipset 1959), generational replacement (Dalton 1994; Inglehart 1990; Jennings, van Deth et al. 1990), or the long-term experience of citizens with rotations of power and a responsible opposition structure among the country’s political parties (Weil 1989; 1993). The view of slow change in cultural values and participatory orientations was echoed in much of the early literature in political socialization, which argued that orientations learned early in life “structured” later adult attitudes and limited the extent to which basic values and preferences would change in response to short-term stimuli (Hess and Torney 1967; Sears 1975). Recent developments in the literature, however, suggest that aspects of democratic culture may be more malleable than previously thought. A steady stream of findings over the past several decades has shown that more immediate variables such as the individual’s perceptions of current economic conditions, assessments of governmental competence, and experiences with governmental authority can affect orientations such as the individual’s “normative commitment to democracy,” and the internalization of democratic values, social and institutional trust, and political efficacy (e.g. Mishler and Rose 1997; Rose and Mishler 1994; Dalton 1994; Brehm and Rahn 1997; Evans and Whitefield 1995; Mattes and Theil 1998). Similarly, Gibson (1998), Sniderman et al. (1996) and others have shown that individuals’ judgments about extending procedural democratic liberties towards one’s opponents can change 6 substantially in response to shifting political arguments, rhetoric, and attempts at political persuasion. The widespread demonstration of such effects has led many to conclude that, although early socialization and social-structural factors play a role in determining democratic orientations, these factors must be augmented by variables related to adult political experiences. Mishler and Rose (1997, 434), for example, explicitly posit what they call a “lifetime learning model,” where attitudes learned early in life are continuously updated as these “early attitudes and beliefs are reinforced or challenged by subsequent experiences.” Clearly, such a view allows a greater potential influence of civic education as another short-term experiential effect on the individual’s overall orientation to democratic politics. More recent political participation research provides even more optimism that civic education may have a significant impact on the individual’s level of engagement with the political system. Following Rosenstone and Hansen (1993) and Verba, Scholzman and Brady (1995), recent scholarship in both advanced and developing democracies has emphasized clearly the role of active mobilization efforts in stimulating individual political behavior. That is, individuals participate not only because they possess the requisite socio-economic resources or favorable attitudinal dispositions, but also because they are asked to participate, either by political parties, groups with which they are affiliated, family, friends, or others in their social networks (e.g., Brady et al. 1999; Bratton 1999; Booth and Richard 1998; Huckfeldt and Sprague (1992); Leighley 1996; Knoke 1990).2 Such an emphasis is echoed in the literature on social movement participation, as a critical predictor in virtually all empirical analyses of participation in movements concerning civil rights, nuclear energy, and the like is whether individuals are recruited or are asked to participate or encouraged by others in the movement network (Eckberg 1988; Snow et al. 1986; McAdam 1982, 1993; Walsh and Warland 1983). The recent emphasis on recruitment and mobilization in the participation literature has clear implications for the analysis of the impact of civic education. Of course, to the extent that classroom2 The importance of such mobilization processes in stimulating participation in developing democracies is perhaps even greater than in the U.S. and other advanced democracies. Bratton (1999) shows, for example, that memberships in parties and voluntary associations are far stronger predictors of participation in Zambia than socio- 7 based or more formal forms of civic instruction contain appeals to take part in politics, we may conceive of any type of civic education that contains appeals to participate as one characterized by “political mobilization.” But there is an even deeper relationship between adult civic education and political mobilization in developing democracies. Civic education in these contexts is conducted overwhelmingly through secondary groups and associations, sometimes by labor, church, or trade associations, but more frequently by what Carothers (1999) refers to as “advocacy NGOs.” These groups, with names such as Grupo Accion por la Democracia in the Dominican Republic, Lawyers for Human Rights in South Africa, and Constitutional and Reform Education Consortium in Kenya, are public interest or reformist groups that are funded by the U.S. and European donors in the hopes that they can become part of a “diverse, active, and independent civil society that articulates the interests of citizens and holds government accountable…” (Carothers 1999, 87). Funding civic education in these settings is thus part of a general strategy of strengthening democracy by strengthening the associations that mediate between citizens and the state. This suggests that civic education training in newly-democratizing contexts has at least two different goals. One is the “public interest” goal, similar to that in classroom-based or formal civic education programs, of providing information about democratic institutions, values, and norms to individuals in order for them to better understand their rights and obligations in a democratic system. The other is for advocacy NGOs to encourage individuals to participate in group activities, thereby strengthening their membership base and increasing their influence as mediating interest groups within the political process. Thus civic education in developing democracies is intimately bound up with processes of group political mobilization. As such, the effects of advocacy-based civic education on political participation may be quite substantial, as the “normal” appeals of civics training to participate in politics are augmented and amplified by the dynamics of mobilization efforts of the groups themselves. economic and attitudinal measures, as the upheavals present in a transitional society with a weakly established democratic culture necessitate more formal institutions to link individuals to the political process. 8 Hypotheses The linkage of civic education with group mobilization processes also provides insight into the precise mechanisms through which civics training may lead to increased political participation. We may classify these mechanisms as the direct, indirect, and conditional effects of civic education on participation, with each figuring prominently in the group mobilization literature. First, civic education should exert a direct effect on behavior, as participants will be exposed to both participatory appeals contained in the civic education curriculum as well to potentially powerful behavioral cues emanating from group leaders and other group members. To the extent that individuals are motivated to adhere to the behavioral expectations of important others in their social networks, participation in group-based civic education training may stimulate subsequent political participation as a response to these social and behavioral cues (McAdam 1993; Rosenstone and Hansen 1993; Finkel and Opp 1991). Further, the advocacy NGOs themselves may differ in the extent to which they directly encourage political participation among their members, as some groups place greater emphasis on issues such as economic development, labor or women’s and family rights (Carothers 1999). We may therefore expect that the stance of the group regarding the desirability of participation should be an important determinant of the subsequent political behavior of the individuals they train through civic education (Verba et al. 1995; Pollack 1982; Leighley 1996). Second, we may expect indirect effects of civic education on political participation, as democracy training may influence a series of orientations, including political efficacy, civic skills, trust, and tolerance, that feed into subsequent political participation. According to this process, civic education produces behavioral change, i.e. increased participation, by changing the values, attitudes, knowledge and self-concepts that predispose individuals to take part in politics. These indirect effects are likely to be especially powerful in group-based civic education, as a wealth of previous research has found that involvement in voluntary group associations affects precisely the same orientations that are expected to influence subsequent participation. Perhaps the most celebrated recent example is the effect of secondary group involvement on political and social trust, aspects of “social capital” that serve to orient the 9 individual to engage in collective political actions (Putnam 1993; Bratton 1999; Booth and Richard 1998). Group associations have also been found to result in increase individuals’ adherence to democratic norms such as tolerance and civic duty, as well as to indicators of “civic competence” such as political efficacy and civic skills (Verba and Nie 1972; Verba et al. 1995; Booth and Richard 1998; Pollack 1982). Thus the curricular goals of civic education join the group-based nature of the programs to produce the expectation of indirect effects of civics training on democratic political participation. Third, we expect that civic education will also have conditional effects on participation, as the impact of group-based programs may differ depending on variables related to the individual’s specific civic education experience, and on variables related to the individual’s demographic and political characteristics. As scholars since Verba and Nie (1972) have found that active group involvement has greater mobilization effects than passive group membership (Leighley 1996; Pollack 1982; McAdam 1993), we may hypothesize first that individuals who are more actively involved in civic education efforts within the group will be more likely to be influenced by both the curricular aspects of civics training and the other group processes that may stimulate participation. We should therefore observe, for example, greater effects on participation among individuals who attend more frequent civic education sessions within the group. But “active involvement” in civics education efforts may go beyond simply attending more frequent training sessions. The type of instruction the individual receives in civic education is likely to matter as well. Much research in social psychology suggests that a significant source of attitudinal and behavioral change is role-playing behavior within groups, as individuals come to adopt attitudes and cognitions that are consistent with the behaviors that they are acting out (Zimbardo and Leippe 1991, 102-108; Fishbein and Ajzen 1975, chapter 10). From the group mobilization perspective, this process may be likened to the development of participatory skills through group involvement, as individuals “practice” participation through group involvement and learn how to transfer these skills outside the group setting (Leighley 1996; Verba et al. 1995; Pollack 1982). It may be expected, therefore, that civic education programs that make use of more active methodologies to instruct participants --- role playing, dramatizations, group 10 decision-making, and the like --- will have a greater effect on eventual individual participation than lecture-based instruction. Finally, the effects of group-based civic education on participation may be greater for certain kinds of individuals than others. Though the goal of many advocacy NGOs conducting civic education is to mobilize dispossessed, marginal, and previously inactive constituencies, it may nevertheless be the case that individuals require sufficient prior resources in order to translate the appeals made through civic education training into actual behavior. Verba et al. (1995, 16), for example, claim that “requests for activity…seem to act as a catalyst for participation among those with the wherewithal and desire to become active.” Similarly, Rosenstone and Hansen (1993, 173-174) show that for participation in acts such as campaign volunteering or party contributions, where the absolute level of activity is relatively low, mobilization efforts are most successful among those who are already most likely to participate. And Brady et al (1999) show clearly that more politically engaged individuals, i.e., those with higher levels of interest, efficacy, and information, are more likely than less-engaged prospects to “assent” to requests by groups to become politically active. Thus we may hypothesize that, among the individuals trained and targeted for mobilization by civic education groups, individuals with higher levels of prior political resources will be more likely to ---- that is, more able and willing to --- respond to the participatory cues that emanate from both the civic education curriculum and the groups that conduct the training. We may expect, therefore, that the effects of civic education will vary directly with the individual’s level of education and political interest, and will be greater in many developing democracies among men than women as well. We also expect that more socially-connected individuals, that is, those who are more active in other secondary groups and associations, will have greater opportunities to reinforce the messages received in the advocacy group’s civic education efforts than more socially-isolated individuals. Hence the individual prior level of “social capital” may be an important facilitating factor in translating civic education messages into eventual political behavior. 11 These effects, moreover, should exist over and above the potential effects of self-selection into civic education programs. That is, it may be the case that individuals who possess higher levels of resources and “participatory predispositions” will be those who are more likely to be targeted for civic education training to begin with, or more likely to volunteer to attend civic education sessions regardless of whether or not they were specifically asked to do so. Controlling for the possible confounding effects of self-selection biases will occupy a good portion of the empirical analyses below. The conditional effects hypothesis claims, however, that even after such selection effects are taken into account, the effects of civic education training should be greater for individuals with greater amounts of political resources and social connectedness. Research Design and Measurement The study examines these processes by comparing the levels of participation observed among individuals trained in four U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) civic education programs conducted in the Dominican Republic in the mid to late 1990s, and three programs conducted in South Africa between 1998 and 1999, with appropriate control groups in both countries. USAID’s Center for Democracy and Governance initiated the evaluation of civic education efforts in the Dominican Republic and Poland in 1996-97, with South Africa added in mid-1998. The Dominican Republic was selected for several reasons, notably the scope of its civic education efforts since the early 1990s and the relative ease of data collection due to the small size of the country. Equally important, the country was coming out of period of semi-authoritarianism and afforded an excellent opportunity to assess the effects of civic education during a particular kind of political transition (see Hartlyn 1998; Espinal 1996). South Africa was included in the study in 1998 because USAID had long targeted the country for democracy assistance, and there were a significant number of ongoing civic education programs over the past year in preparation for the June 1999 elections. In addition, the USAID mission in Pretoria took particular interest in the project in order to obtain information about how better to implement civic education and other programs in the future. Dominican Republic 12 The first of the programs studied was conducted by a national elections oriented nongovernmental organization, Participación Ciudadana (PC). For the 1996 presidential elections, PC created another group, called La Red de los Observadores Electorales, to organize and train youth and adults to serve as election observers in 1996 and to conduct a quick count of the vote. The program ran from 1995 to mid-1996, although PC activities continued into 1997, still focused on elections. Of those in the sample 14% of the respondents were exposed to PC and Red training sessions but did not eventually work as election observers. The second program was conducted by a newly formed non-governmental organization, Grupo Accion por la Democracia (GAD). The program was conducted in two phases, with the first phase dedicated to a general educational program concerning basic political rights and obligations in a democracy, primarily through a lecture format. The second phase brought these people together to hold a series of national and local issues forums to discuss problems and solutions in specific policy areas, such as justice, health, and education. Local government authorities attended these forums as well. The two phases were intended to create a national NGO with a network of local branches outside of Santo Domingo and to mobilize citizens to participate in these new structures. The program ran from November 1995 to October 1996. The third program was part of a larger community finance and small business development program for women conducted through women’s small business NGO, Asociación Dominicana para el Desarrollo de la Mujer (ADOPEM). The program trained women community leaders in women's rights, democratic values, democracy in the family, and self-esteem, using a classroom/workshop format, and ran from January 1996 to January 1997. The fourth program studied was conducted by a local NGO affiliated with a local radio station in La Vega, Radio Santa María (RSM). The project trained intermediaries (typically leaders of rural towns) who then conducted civic education in their local communities. The subject matter focused on civic knowledge and values, such as rights and duties in a democracy, the importance 13 of participation, and democracy in the family. RSM ran two consecutive projects, from 1994 to 1995 and from 1995 to December 1996. In all of the programs in the Dominican Republic except Radio Santa Maria, treatment samples were drawn from lists of participants provided by the implementing organizations. For the Radio Santa Maria program, only lists of the “leaders” or first-stage participants were maintained, and we obtained names of ordinary participants through “snowball” sampling methods from interviewers with the firststage participants. The number of individuals interviewed from the four programs totaled 1018. The strategy for obtaining appropriate control samples was to select non-participants at random in each of the regions where the programs were conducted. The sampling began with a national stratified random sample of 50 municipalities, as the PC program operated nation-wide, and GAD operated in all areas except for Santo Domingo, the country’s capital. Individuals were selected for inclusion in the sample in proportion to the population of the selected municipality. This control sample was then supplemented with an oversample of individuals in La Vega, where the Radio Santa Maria program operated, and an oversample of women in the four areas where ADOPEM conducted its training. The number of individuals interviewed for the control groups was 1017. Appendix A-1 summarizes the participant and control samples for each of the four Dominican programs. The in-country survey was conducted by the Instituto de Estudios de Población y Desarrollo (IEPD), the statistical office affiliated with PROFAMILIA. Data were collected from February to April 1998. The response rate for the survey was an excellent 90.5%, with 98% response for the participant sample and 83.7% response for the control group. Due to the lack of appropriate Census-type data, it is impossible to assess definitively the representativeness of the sample, but the age, educational level, and marital status of our control sample closely resemble the levels seen in the 1993 DEMOS survey conducted on behalf of USAID, which at the time represented the last official survey of political values of the Dominican Republic population before the current study. 14 South Africa The South African study included three programs that conducted civic education among black and coloured adults. The first was run by the National Institute for Public Interest Law and Research (NIPILAR). NIPILAR is “the lead organization of a Consortium operating at the national level in the field of public interest law, rights education with emphasis on women and children’s rights, as well as the Constitution and Bill of Rights education. The activities aim to promote the 1) respect, practice and fulfillment of human, legal, and civil rights; 2) respect for the rights of women and children and 3) a widespread awareness of human rights and democracy” (USAID/Pretoria Activity Summary 1998). One of the main civic education programs conducted by NIPILAR over the past several years was its Women’s Rights program, designed to promote awareness of the United Nations Women and Children’s Rights Convention. The second program was operated through the Community Law Centre-Durban (CLC). CLC is part of the Consortium described above, and thus has many of the same goals and activities as NIPILAR. CLC, however, operates almost exclusively within the province of KwaZulu Natal, where NIPILAR does not operate. Its primary activities are to coordinate approximately 30 rural legal advice offices in the province. The advice offices provide assistance to community members on legal and human rights issues. Democracy and civic education workshops are also conducted through the advice centers. The third South Africa program was conducted by Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR). LHR is a national organization aiming to increase the awareness of human and democratic rights in South Africa. The organization holds an extensive series of workshops yearly on democracy and human rights issues, with different aspects of democracy receiving particular emphasis in different years. Workshops in the last two years have emphasized the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and participation in politics, respectively. The first two groups were selected primarily because of the support that USAID-South Africa has provided for their civic education efforts. LHR was included in the study in order to examine a nonUSAID-funded group, and because it is a well-known NGO promoting democracy and human rights in 15 South Africa. LHR also conducted civic education in eight of the nine provinces of South Africa; NIPILAR was also more or less national in focus, while CLC-Durban’s area of operation was mainly within one province, KwaZulu Natal. The three NGOS operate in generally similar fashion with regard to their civic education activities. Representatives from the central offices train a core group of individuals, called “paralegals,” in democracy and human rights instruction. These activities, generally known as Training of Trainers (ToT), consume a considerable amount of the group’s time and resources. The paralegals then go on to operate offices in villages and towns across country, from which they provide a number of services for individual residents. Some of these services have nothing to do with civic education, for example providing advice on economic development or labor law. However, the paralegals are also expected to conduct community workshops on different aspects of democratic governance and human rights, and these activities are the focus of our study. According to interviews with the groups’ staff conducted by members of our research team, the number of workshops throughout the country are claimed to be in the hundreds yearly by LHR and NIPILAR, reaching many thousands of ordinary citizens.3 As in the Dominican Republic, the treatment group interviews were obtained through sampling lists of civic education participants provided by the three NGOs (either national representatives or the facilitators or paralegals who ran the civic education programs in each of the areas). Participants were selected systematically from the lists whenever addresses and contact information was provided. In regions where no lists of names and addresses existed, the facilitators or paralegals themselves located the requisite number of participants and provided contact information to the South African survey organization, Markinor, which collected the data. The sample of participants is shown in Appendix A-2. The control group of non-participants in South Africa was designed slightly differently than in the Dominican Republic. Instead of aiming to produce a random sample of the South African black or coloured population, we attempted to introduce more rigorous experimental control at the outset by 16 “mirroring” the participant sample on a number of important demographic dimensions. Interviewers were instructed to conduct an interview with a civic education participant selected according to the procedures just described, and then to conduct an identical interview in the same area with a person who had not participated in civic education. The control group respondent was to be the same race, gender, and age group as the participant. Interviewers were instructed to make a systematic selection of houses, beginning with the third house from the civic education participant who had been interviewed, in order to find an appropriate non-participant for inclusion. These sampling procedures produced a total of 1550 interviews for the study, with the final data collection conducted between 10 May and 1 June 1999. The questionnaires were translated into Zulu, Xhosa, Tswana, Northern Sotho, Southern Sotho, and Afrikaans so that respondents could be interviewed in the language with which they felt most comfortable. The final sample consisted of: 475 adult participants in civic education, and 475 adult non-participants who were matched on race, gender, and age. 10 individuals from the treatment group were eliminated from the analysis because it became unclear in the course of the interview how many workshops they had attended, or whether they had been exposed to civic education “treatment” at all. Measurement of Political Participation The dependent variable in the analysis in both countries consists of four behaviors that commonly take place at the local or community level: taking part in organized community problem-solving activity; attending a local government meeting; working in an election campaign; and contacting a local elected official. I focus on local-level participation because of the emphasis placed in civic education training on relating abstract concepts about democracy and citizen participation to local-level political issues and institutions. The scale used in the analysis thus comprises five points, running from zero (no behaviors) to four (all behaviors). The reliability of the scale is .64 in the Dominican Republic, and .77 in South Africa. 3 The research team included myself and Sheryl Stumbras of Management Systems International, Robert Mattes, a public opinion and democracy specialist at IDASA (Institute for Democracy in South Africa), and Dumisani Hlophe, 17 Independent Variables I include a number of attitudinal and demographic control variables in the analysis. A series of democratic orientations were included as potentially intervening variables in the “indirect effects” model described above: political knowledge, civic skills, political efficacy, political tolerance and political trust. Details on these questions and the resultant scales can be found in the Appendix. I also included a series of demographic and political control variables, including educational attainment, age, income, gender, race, religiosity (church attendance), interest, media exposure, previous voting behavior, and the number of voluntary organizations to which the individual belongs. Details on these items are also found in the Appendix. Statistical Methods After presenting the simple bivariate relationships, I estimate several models that attempt to isolate the effect of civic education on political participation, controlling for other known determinants of participation, as well as controlling for the selection biases that are inherent in the civic education programs examined in the two countries. The fundamental problem in assessing the effect of civic education on participation (or other democratic orientations) is that, in the absence of a pre-test and/or randomized assignment of individuals to civic education “treatments,” we cannot rule out with absolute certainty the possibility that individuals who were trained in civic education workshops already possessed those attributes that correlate with participation, or that pre-disposed them to increased participation tolerance in the absence of any “treatment” whatsoever. Indeed those attributes, such as education, group memberships, political interest, and the like, are exactly the factors that may lead individuals to attend civic education workshops in the first place. Thus any observed difference between civic education participants and the control group on participation many be due to the pre-existing differences on these other variables.4 a PhD student specializing in democratization and civil society at the University of Durban-Westville. 4 These problems are endemic in the evaluation of policy programs in general. For overviews of these issues and some of the available solutions, see Achen (1986), Moffitt (1991), and Stromsdorfer and Farkas (1980). 18 The most basic approach for dealing with these selection biases is to include all other variables that are known to be related to both civic education exposure and participation into the statistical model. These variables are entered along with the treatment variables in an OLS multiple regression analysis (or equivalently, through analysis of covariance methods), which estimates the effect of the treatment on participation after taking into account the differences between the treatment and the control groups on the other variables included in the model. Thus the treatment effect in these models represents the estimate of how much civic education affects participation, over and above the effects of all the observed control variables. I present these estimates below under the label “Regression Model --- OLS”. As many scholars have shown, however, the OLS approach fails to account for an additional, and potentially important, source of bias in the estimation of treatment effects. As Achen (1986), Barnow et al (1980), Heckman and Robb (1985), and others suggest, there may be differences between the treatment and control group on relevant unmeasured variables that influence both the decision to attend a treatment program as well as the program’s desired outcome. For example, individuals who decide to attend civic education workshops may differ from other individuals not only in terms of observed characteristics such as group memberships, educational attainment, and political interest, but also in terms of unobserved variables such as their intrinsic predisposition toward democracy, their motivation to succeed in a democratic society, their need for sociability, and the like. If these factors related to self-selection are also positively (or negatively) related to participation, then estimates of the treatment effect of civic education will be biased, as the estimated regression coefficient for attending civic education would include some of the effect of these unmeasured variables as well. More technically, the problem exists because of the potential for a correlation between the error terms in the selection equation (i.e. the decision to attend a civic education workshop) and the outcome equation (the prediction of political tolerance), due to unmeasured factors or to random perturbations that influence both the decision to participate and the outcome in question (Berk and Ray 1982; Breen, 1996, 35). To correct this problem, which biases estimates of coefficients in the outcome equation, Heckman 19 (e.g. 1992) has proposed the following two-step procedure, also discussed at length in Achen (1986), Green (1993, 713-174), Vella (1997, 135-138), and Winship and Morgan (1999, 669-687). In the first step, the decision to participate in the treatment program is modeled via probit analysis, with individuals who were exposed to the treatment T coded as “1” and the control group coded as “0.” Thus (1) Ti = γ k w i + υ i where the w represent all independent variables that predict whether individuals attend civic education workshops or not, the γ k are their respective regression coefficients, and the υ i are assumed to be normally distributed. The “generalized probit residuals” (Vella 1997, 136) from this equation are then calculated as (2) λ i = φ (γ k w i ) / Φ (γ k w i ) for the civic education participants (T = 1) and (3) λ i = − φ ( γ k w i ) /( 1 − Φ ( γ k w i )) for the control group (T = 0) , where φ ( γ k w i ) represents the height of the normal distribution (the probability density) at the point γ k w i , and Φ ( γ k w i ) represents the cumulative probability at the same point.5 The second step in the process is to use those residualized estimates as an additional independent variable in the outcome equation, as in: (4) y i = β k x i + βt T + βλ λ i + ε i where the x represent all independent variables that affect the outcome in question, T represents the treatment, and the β are respective regression coefficients. It can then be shown that the regression coefficient for the generalized residual term, β λ , is an estimate of Rho ( ρ ), the correlation between the 20 errors in the selection and outcome equations, multiplied by the outcome equation’s standard error of estimate ( ρ σ ε ) (Greene 1993). According to this model, the difference between individuals in the civic education group and the control group on tolerance will be equal to: (5) β t + ρ σ ε [φ i /(Φ i (1 − Φ i ) ] or the “true” effect of the treatment, β t , plus some bias term that is a function of Rho, the standard error of estimate σ ε , and the generalized probit residuals from the selection equation. If Rho is positive, this means that, other things being equal, the bias term will be larger, and the estimated “true” effect of civic education on participation will be smaller than in an OLS formulation.6 If Rho is negative, bias term will be smaller, and the estimate of the “true” effect of civic education on participation will be correspondingly larger than the estimated obtained in OLS. If Rho is statistically indistinguishable from zero, then the unmeasured factors that lead individuals to participate in civic education programs, over and above the variables that are included in the participation equation, are irrelevant for the prediction of participation. In that case the results from what I will refer to as the “Self-Selection” or “Heckman Model” and the OLS regression model will be substantively equivalent. The models were estimated using LIMDEP 7.0. Results Bivariate Findings Table 1 displays the simple percentage differences in self-reported participation between individuals who were exposed to civic education in the four Dominican programs and three South African programs, along with the percentages for individuals who received no civic education (the control group). 5 This expression is often referred to as the Inverse Mills Ratio (IMR). The IMR decreases monotonically for the treatment group as the probability that T = 1 increases, and decreases monotonically for the control group as the probability that T = 0 increases. 6 Intuitively, a positive Rho means that individuals who were treated have larger error terms in the outcome equation than individuals in the control group. OLS ignores this fact and produces an exaggerated impact of the treatment on 21 (Table 1 goes here) As can be seen in both countries, there are substantial differences between civic education participants and the control group on all of the political participation items. Individuals who were exposed to civic education in the Dominican Republic, for example, were roughly twice as participatory as individuals in the control group, with the largest effects being seen for community problem-solving participation and attendance at local municipal meetings. The differences vary substantially between programs as well, as it appears that GAD participants in particular are extremely active, with ADOPEM participants only somewhat more participatory than the control group, and the two other programs falling in between. On the overall participation scale, GAD participants average a very high 2.31 behaviors (out of 4), over three times the size of the control group’s average of .73, while the other program means are roughly 1.5 to 2 times the mean of control group. Clearly civic education participants in the Dominican Republic are much more active in a variety of political behaviors than the average Dominican individual, though of course we cannot yet claim that such differences can be attributed to the civic education experience. Differences of slightly smaller magnitude can be found between civic education participants and the control group in South Africa.7 In the bottom half of Table 1, it can be seen that participation in two programs – Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR) and the NIPILAR women’s rights program – is associated with significantly higher levels of participation on each of the four political participation items than the control group. Participants in the CLC program, however, which operated exclusively in the politicallytroubled KwaZulu Natal region, showed no differences in participation over the control group. The differences for LHR and NIPILAR over the control group are of similar magnitude for each participation item, with both LHR and NIPILAR respondents showing participation rates at roughly 1.5 to 2.9 times the control group average. On the overall scale, the control group mean is just under 1 behavior (out of 4 the outcome. A negative Rho indicates the reverse; smaller error terms in the outcome equation for treated individuals, and consequently an underestimation by OLS of the “true” causal impact of the treatment. 7 Recall, however, that the control group in South Africa consisted of individuals who were closely matched to the CE sample on age, race, gender and place of residence; to the extent that these factors are relevant to political participation, smaller bivariate differences would be expected to emerge before controlling for these variables in multivariate analyses. 22 total), with both LHR and NIPILAR respondents reporting between 1.6 and 1.8 behaviors on average. Clearly, participants in two of the three South African programs are also more politically active at the local level than non-participants. Multivariate Analysis and Controls for Selection Effects Tables 2A and 2B present the results of multivariate analysis of the effects of civic education on the overall political participation scale in the Dominican Republic and South Africa, respectively. In model (1) in both tables, the effects of each of the civic education programs are shown, controlling for a series of demographic and political variables that may relate to both political participation and to the likelihood of exposure to civic education. Model (2) displays the effects of the same independent variables in the context of the self-selection model, which introduces an added control for unobserved factors that may influence both the probability of exposure to civic education and participation. This control variable is denoted as “Inverse Mills Ratio (Lambda)” in Model 2 in both countries. (Tables 2A and 2B go here) The results of these analyses indicate that a significant portion of the bivariate differences between Civic education participants and the control group on political participation can be attributed to the selection process; that is, CE participants in general have many of the demographic and political characteristics that predispose them to be more active politically than control group individuals. In Model 1 in the Dominican Republic, for example, it can be seen that controlling for these factors --- in particular the individual’s level of involvement in secondary associations, political interest, urban residence and gender --- completely eliminates the observed differences from Table 1 in participation rates for PC and ADOPEM individuals compared to the control group. Nevertheless, significant differences in overall political participation rates remain for GAD respondents and individuals trained in the Radio Santa Maria program, with the GAD effect of .73 being about one-third of its bivariate value, and the RSM effect of .31 being about one-half its bivariate size. The effects for both programs in the Dominican Republic are substantively meaningful as well, with CE participation being among the strongest predictors of political behaviors among all variables in the table. 23 The significant effect of the GAD and RSM civic education programs also persists after controlling for potential biases in the context of the Heckman self-selection in Model (2).8 As discussed above, the first stage in the self-selection process is to model explicitly the decision to attend civic education workshops, and to produce an estimated residual from this equation for both civic education participants and the control group which is introduced into the model predicting political participation. The results of the probit model predicting civic education participation indicate that a series of demographic (age, education, gender, rural residence) and political factors (interest, group memberships, prior voting behavior) are associated with exposure to the civic education “treatment.” And as can be seen in Model (2) in Table 2A, the coefficient estimate for the Inverse Mills Ratio is .09, which also translates into a .09 estimate for Rho, the correlation between the error terms in the civic education treatment and participation equations (as Rho equals the coefficient estimate multiplied by 1.03, the standard error of estimate for the participation equation). This estimate is statistically significant, indicating that there is a small positive residual correlation between civic education treatment and political participation, once the observed variables are taken into account. Substantively, however, the residual error correlation between the treatment and outcome equations has little relatively impact on the model’s overall results. The effect for GAD is nearly identical to its OLS estimate and the effect for the RSM treatment falls by about 16% to .26. There are concomitant increases in the estimates of some of the control variables, as the effect of group memberships, political interest, urban residence, and prior voting behavior each register increases over their OLS values.9 But 8 I report the program effects only for GAD and RSM in the Heckman model in Table 2. The estimated effects for PC and ADOPEM, already insignificant in the OLS formulation in Model 1, were also insignificant in Heckman models that were estimated separately. 9 This occurs, as Achen (1986) explains, because these variables all have significant positive effects in the treatment equation. Individuals in the treatment group, for example, are disproportionately active in secondary groups, so individuals in the treatment group who are inactive in secondary groups must have had large positive error terms in the treatment equation. By virtue of the positive correlated error in the treatment and outcome equations, they are also somewhat more likely to participate politically, over and above their objective score on the group memberships variable. So the treatment group is composed of individuals who are highly active in secondary groups and atypical individuals who are inactive in secondary groups yet otherwise predisposed to participate politically. Similarly, the control group is composed of individuals who are less active in secondary groups and atypical individuals who are more active in secondary groups yet otherwise predisposed not to participate politically. Hence the estimated effect 24 the overall conclusion from the two models is clear: civic education treatment in two of the four Dominican programs has substantial effects on the individual’s propensity to participate in politics at the local level, over and above the fact that treated individuals differ from the control group on a host of observed (and unobserved) factors that predict political participation as well. Table 2B shows the similar analyses conducted for the South African sample. Model (1) shows that, controlling for a series of demographic and political factors, individuals who were treated in the LHR and NIPILAR programs were significantly more participatory than individuals in the control group. These differences ---- about .4 on the overall participation scale --- are approximately 50% the size of the initial observed differences seen in Table 1. As in the Dominican Republic, the civic education effects are among the strongest in the Table, with differences between the two treatment groups and the control group being larger than, for example, the relatively sizeable differences in participation between men and women and between black and coloured respondents. The self-selection model (2) in the table shows a nearly identical set of results, primarily because the estimated correlation between the error terms in the selection and outcome equations is statistically insignificant. There is, in fact, a slight negative estimate for the effect of the Inverse Mills Ratio (Lambda), which translates into an estimated error term correlation of -.03. This pattern, though statistically insignificant, is congruent with the findings from a previous paper on political tolerance (Finkel 2000), where it was found that individuals in the civic education treatment groups were also predisposed towards lower levels of tolerance than the control group. In the selection equation for South Africa, the findings indicate that key variables such as education and income are in fact negatively related to CE treatment, in contrast to the pattern seen in the Dominican Republic. This means that civic education is attracting individuals who possess some characteristics that are negatively related to participation in the South African context, and the negative value for Rho in the Heckman model suggests that unmeasured factors in the selection process to a small degree reinforce this tendency. The effect is of group membership is dampened in the OLS model, as OLS does not take into account the negative relationship between group memberships and the error term of the treatment equation. 25 not large enough to produce differences between the OLS and self-selection models; nevertheless it shows that predispositions to participation are not necessarily higher among the types of individuals who are participants in democracy training sessions, and this makes successful civic education more difficult to achieve in the South African context. How can the variations in program effects within and across countries be explained? It was hypothesized above that the degree to which individuals who were trained in particular groups became active politically would vary directly with the importance placed on participation by the group itself and the resultant behavioral cues imparted by the group leadership and other group members. This cannot be proven definitely with the data at hand, but such an interpretation is almost entirely consistent with the results seen in Tables 2A and 2B. The participants from Participacion Ciudinada (PC), for example, were given civics training specifically to prepare them for roles as observers in the 1996 Presidential elections, not to mobilize local-level participation more generally. Similarly, ADOPEM’s primary emphasis was in the area of women’s development in the economic sector; its civic education functions were of secondary importance. By contrast, the raison d’etre of the GAD program was to promote local level problem-solving and community action, while Radio Santa Maria in the Dominican Republic, and LHR and NIPILAR in South Africa were all broad-based training programs emphasizing knowledge, skills, values and participation through community workshops conducted by the advocacy groups’ “paralegals”. The only finding that does not conform to this hypothesis is the low level of mobilization seen among CLC participants in South Africa. This program’s emphasis and general structure was similar to RSM, LHR and NIPILAR, yet the results were much less satisfactory in terms of stimulating post-workshop political participation. The Indirect Effects of Civic Education The results thus far suggest that at least some civic education programs can have a substantial stimulating effect on local-level political participation in both the Dominican Republic and South Africa. Yet it remains unclear whether the effects are the result of the behavioral cues and direct mobilization appeals made by the groups conducting the civic education training, or whether civic education and other 26 group-related processes influence participation indirectly, through their influence on other democratic skills, values, or participatory orientations. Model (3) in Tables 2A and 2B show the results related to this hypothesis in the Dominican Republic and South Africa, respectively. In each country, the same Heckman self-selection model from (2) was estimated again, after including five important democratic orientations: political knowledge, civic skills, efficacy, tolerance, and political trust. The results show weak support for the “indirect effects” model. In Table 2A, it can be seen that only two of the intervening variables, political knowledge and civic skills, are themselves significant determinants of local level participation, while efficacy, tolerance and trust are irrelevant, once other variables are taken into account. And controlling for all of these factors in Model (3) decreases the effect of the GAD program on participation by only about 10%, while the effect of the RSM program increases somewhat over the “reduced form” estimates from Model (2).10 This indicates that the overwhelming portion of the initial civic education influence on participation cannot be explained though indirect processes; by far the more substantial effects appear to be the result of direct political mobilization from participation in the group-based civic education programs. Table 2B shows a very similar set of results from South Africa. Among the potentially intervening variables, knowledge and efficacy have direct effects on participation, while skills, tolerance and trust are irrelevant. Controlling for all these factors in turn reduces the impact of the two significant civic education programs by only 13% in the case of NIPILAR, and 25% in the case of LHR. As in the Dominican Republic, then, there is some indirect effect of civic education on participation through knowledge and efficacy, but most of the direct effects persist after taking these variables into account. Previous analyses of these programs have found significant positive effects of civic education on political tolerance in both countries (Finkel 2000) , and significant effects (negative in the Dominican Republic, positive in South Africa) on trust in social and political institutions (Finkel et al 2000; Finkel and Stumbras 2000). But neither of these factors appears to be directly related to political participation. 10 The RSM coefficient increases because of an unexpectedly negative effect of civic education training on skills among participation in that program. 27 Thus civic education affects a range of important democratic political orientations, but the bulk of its effect on participation does not operate through attitudinal change or changes in civic competence, knowledge, or skills. The evidence thus far suggests that civic education training --- at least training that is conducted within 4 of the 7 programs examined in the overall study --- represent direct mobilizing instruments for local level participation in both the Dominican Republic and South Africa. “Conditional Mobilization”: The Role of Civic Education Frequency and Pedagogical Methods According to the “conditional mobilization” model discussed above, the effects of civic education on participation should depend on factors related to the nature of the individual’s civic education experience, and factors related to the individual’s previous store of political resources. That is, we expect to find greater effects when individuals receive more frequent exposure to the mobilizing messages of civic education, when those messages are taught through more intensive, involving participatory methodologies, and when the individual has sufficient political resources to act on the messages received through civic education training. In this section I test the conditional mobilization effects of factors related to the civic education training per se; in the following section I analyze the role of the individual’s prior political resources in facilitating the acceptance of mobilization appeals. To measure the frequency of exposure to civic education, respondents were asked how often they had attended sessions sponsored by the particular program in which they were engaged. Response categories ranged from once, twice, three times, to four or more exposures. To measure the extent of exposure to participatory teaching methods, respondents were asked which of the following methods were used in the programs they attended (breaking into small groups, staging plays or dramatizations, playing games, problem-solving, and simulations or role-playing). In the Dominican Republic respondents were asked further whether they had much opportunity to express their own views in the program, and in South Africa whether workshops had included “staging mock trials of legal proceedings,” or “staging mock elections or other kinds of political activities.” The scales thus ran from 0 to 6 in the Dominican Republic, and 0 to 7 in South Africa. Both variables were then entered into the Heckman self-selection model in place of the simple dummy variable for program participation seen in Tables 2A and 2B. The analyses 28 were limited to those programs where significant effects were found in the earlier tables. Thus PC and ADOPEM respondents were eliminated from the Dominican Republic analysis, and CLC respondents were eliminated from the analysis for South Africa. The results strongly support the conditional mobilization hypotheses in both country contexts. In the Dominican Republic, the results indicate that each training session the individual attended was associated with an increase in local-level participation of .09 (s.e. of .04, p<.05), while each participatory method used in CE instruction was associated with an increase in local-level participation of .20 (s.e. of .04, p<.01). The corresponding results in South Africa were .14 for CE frequency (s.e. of .05, p<.01), and .22 for participatory teaching methodologies (s.e. of .06, p<.01). Thus individuals who were trained more frequently, with more participatory instructional methods, showed greater increases in local-level participation over the control group than civic education participants who were trained less frequently, with more traditional classroom or lecture-based teaching methodologies. (Table 3 goes here) I summarize these effects in Table 3 by showing the predicted increment in local participation over the control group for individuals whose civic education experience was either more or less frequent, and accompanied by greater or fewer participatory teaching methodologies. As can be seen, in the Dominican Republic (Table 3A), individuals who were trained once or twice with fewer than 4 participatory methods registered, on average, a .44 increase in participation over the control group. This figure increases to .62 for individuals who were trained more often (between 3 and 4 times), but with few participatory methodologies. Larger increases still are seen for individuals whose training encompassed more active methodologies, with an increment of over 1 behavior on the 4 point participation scale being registered for individuals who were training often and with many active methods. The effects are somewhat more dramatic for the South African sample: individuals who are trained infrequently and with more traditional methods register .65 increments on the participation scale over the control group; this figure more than doubles to 1.37 behaviors for individuals who were trained both frequently with many active 29 methods.11 Thus, the effectiveness of mobilization appeals in civic education depend directly on the nature of the individual’s experience with the training itself: the more exposure to civic education, the more individuals come into contact with mobilizing appeals by the group; and the more participatory methods that are used in instruction, the more individuals develop “practice” in political participation that subsequently influences later activities outside of the civic education context. “Conditional Mobilization”: The Role of Political Resources The second set of hypotheses in the “conditional mobilization” model concern the effects of civic education on individuals who possess different amounts of participatory resources such as education, political interest, and memberships in voluntary associations. As suggested by recent mobilization literature (Rosenstone and Hansen 1993; Brady et al. 1999), the effects of active recruitment efforts by parties, groups, and other mobilization agents should depend on the individual’s prior dispositions to participate. If individuals do not possess a sufficient amount of information, skills, or social attachments, they may be unable to act on the information imparted in civic education training, and hence unable to translate mobilization appeals into actual political participation. This suggests an interaction effect between exposure to civic education and various indicators of prior participatory resources and skills. To test these hypotheses, I created simple interaction terms between the civic education treatment and a set of demographic and political factors that correspond to participatory resources in both countries: education, group memberships, political interest, gender (male) and, in South Africa, race (black). In South Africa especially, there was very high multicollinearity between the various civic education and resource products. I therefore created dichotomous indicators of group memberships (zero or 1 group 11 Interpretation of larger effects in Table 3 for South Africa should be tempered by the fact, compared to the Dominican Republic, a smaller proportion of the South African civic education sample was trained frequently (33% versus 43%), and a smaller proportion was trained with more active teaching methodologies (48% versus 51%). The table thus shows the potential effect of civic education in both contexts under certain conditions; the favorable conditions were met more frequently among programs in the Dominican Republic. The distinction between actual and potential civic education effects will be discussed further in the conclusion. 30 versus 2 or more) and political interest (divided at the 50th percentile).12 The civic education treatment variables, resources, and the interaction terms were then entered into the Heckman self-selection model of Table 2. I show the effects of civic education treatment, prior resources, and the interaction terms in Table 4; the effects of the other demographic and political control variables are omitted to simply the presentation of results. (Table 4 goes here) Table 4 indicates that the individual’s prior political resources condition the effects of CE in both countries in important --- though not fully consistent ---ways. In the Dominican Republic, all four interaction terms attain statistical significance, despite a reasonable amount of collinearity between the civic education and resources product terms. The model R-squared of .37, moreover, represents a substantial improvement over the .34 value from Table 2. Substantively, the results indicate that CE has larger effects on local participation among men than women, and stronger effects among politically interested and socially attached individuals as well. For example, the marginal effect of GAD civic education training for women is .17, while the effect is over three times that amount (.53) for Dominican men. The social and structural barriers to mobilizing women to participate in the Dominican context are thus reinforced by civic education training., despite the fact that women in the GAD treatment group participate at rates similar to men in the control group (.21). Thus civic education serves to mobilize those with fewer social resources (women) to some degree, but greater effects are seen for those whose resources facilitate the translation of mobilization messages into actual behavior. Similar interaction effects are seen in the Dominican Republic for political interest and group memberships: more highly interested, socially attached individuals are substantially more influenced by civic education mobilization appeals training than less interested, socially isolated trainees. 12 This strategy has the drawback of preventing the testing of curvilinear relationships between civic education and prior resources (such that treatment at very high levels of resources may be less effective than treatment at moderate levels). I tested trichotomous versions of education, interest, and group membership variables in the subsequent analysis and found no evidence of improvement in the model fit. 31 The same general pattern of interaction effects is seen in South Africa, though the collinearity between the various product terms renders the conclusions somewhat more tentative. It can be seen that significant interactions exist between civic education and political interest, and between civic education and the individual’s other group memberships. The interaction effects for education, gender and race are irrelevant. This indicates that highly interested individuals who are trained in civic education sessions in South Africa are substantially more likely to participate in subsequent political activities than less interested trainees, and individuals who belong to at least two secondary associations participate more frequently as a result of civic education training as well. In all of these cases, mobilization efforts within the context of civic education are more successful when individuals have higher levels of prior resources, presumably reflecting greater ability and willingness to translate the messages of civic education training into concrete action. There is one exception, however, to this general pattern, and that is the negative interaction in the Dominican Republic between civic education exposure and education. This indicates that, controlling for all other variables, individuals at higher education levels are less influenced by civic education appeals than individuals at lower levels of education. The effect, however, should be understood within the context of the overall effect of education on political participation in the Dominican Republic. It can be seen from Table 2A that education has a slight negative impact on local level participation in general, a pattern that conforms with Bratton’s (1999) results in Zambia as well. Thus it is not always the case that educational attainment is positively associated with political participation in developing democracies. What does appear to be the case, however, is that civic education reinforces the resource-disparities that exist for political participation otherwise. That is, variables such as political interest, gender (male) and group memberships are positively related overall to political participation in the Dominican Republic, and the interaction of civic education and these resources on participation is therefore positive. Education is negatively related to participation, and the negative interaction of civic education with education reinforces this effect as well. This pattern of a reinforcement effect of civic education on resource-based 32 disparities in participation, again, is fully consistent with a view of civics training as deeply embedded in more traditional group mobilization dynamics of developing democracies. Conclusion This study of the impact of adult civic education on political participation in two developing democracies, the Dominican Republic and South Africa, showed that democracy training has significant effects on local-level participation in four of the seven programs examined in the two countries. The effects remained significant in multivariate models, and in models that attempted to control for the selfselection processes that are inherent in the implementation of civic education programs. The effects were only modestly explained through the impact of civic education training on other democratic orientations such as efficacy, knowledge, tolerance, and trust; almost all of the direct effect of civic education persisted after these potentially intervening variables were taken into account. Finally, the effects of civic education on participation in both countries varied considerably, depending on the frequency of the individual’s exposure to civic education training, the extent to which the training was conducted with active, participatory teaching methodologies, and the level of the individual’s prior participatory resources. In short, civic education can mobilize individuals in developing democracies to participate in politics, but not unqualifiedly so. The success of civic education efforts depends directly on the same factors that mitigate or enhance successful group mobilization in general. The findings have important theoretical implications for our understanding of the development of democratic culture, along with several practical implications for the implementation of civic education programs in emerging democracies. First, they lend additional credence to the growing claim that democratic political culture can change significantly in response to short-term stimuli. As suggested by the “lifetime learning model” (Mishler and Rose 1997), democratic orientations and behaviors may be altered under the right conditions. The findings thus provide an interesting twist to Dalton’s assertion in the East German context that “democratic norms are not learned through formal education and indoctrination but through experience with the democratic process” (1994, 490). The analysis here suggests that successful civic education in developing democracies may be viewed profitably as a 33 combination of “formal indoctrination” and direct political experience; that is civic education exposes individuals to both curricular instruction and group-related mobilization appeals, and this combination of influences appears to be highly capable of effecting substantial short-term change in the individual’s propensity to engage the political system. Thus experience is critical to the development of democratic attitudes and behavior, but this does not mean that it is necessarily outside the reach of the advocacy groups that conduct training in democracy. The results found here, in combination with those reported in previous work (Finkel 2000; Finkel et al., 2000; Finkel and Stumbras 2000; Sabatini et al, 1998), lead to two additional conclusions. First, it appears that the effects of civic education on local-level participation are larger in magnitude than those seen for almost all other democratic orientations, including tolerance, trust, knowledge, efficacy, and support for the rule of law. Further, at least in the short-term, these orientations themselves do not necessarily appear to be powerful predictors of individual participation (see also Bratton 1999). This suggests that changes in political participation may be easier to effect than changes in more general democratic orientations; thus it may be the case that one promising route for the development of democratic culture may be for groups to emphasize political mobilization in the hopes that individual activity will stimulate the development of more durable democratic attitudes in the future (but see Bratton et al. 1998). Such a process, in fact, may well describe the ways that democratic attitudes, values and norms can develop in transitional systems with weakly formed democratic political cultures. Second, the results suggest that the effectiveness of adult civic education in developing democracies depends crucially on the advocacy NGOs and other groups that conduct the civic education training. The strategy of funding such groups as a means of strengthening civil society and the democratization process has been severely criticized, as it is often claimed that advocacy groups represent only a narrow part of many countries’ emerging civil society, that they are “top-down” or “elite” associations that can only be sustained through external funding, and that they are sometimes prone to corruption and mismanagement (e.g. Carothers 1999; Ottaway and Chung 1999; Lasota 1999). The present study cannot speak to all of these issues, yet the results here suggest that such groups may be highly effective mobilizing agents for 34 citizen participation precisely because they are often directly focused on that task. By contrast, the behavioral cues for political participation that emanate from many other civil society groups are likely to be much more muted. Moreover, the fact that advocacy NGOs draw many of the participants for civic education training from existing civil society associations, and the fact that civic education appears to have greater effects among individuals who are already members of other secondary groups, suggests that advocacy groups are able to use existing civil society groups effectively to further their own aims. To this extent the strategy of funding explicitly political organizations to achieve explicitly political goals seems to make a good deal of sense. At the same time, the results point to several limitations of civic education as a means of developing democratic political culture. The results demonstrate that when individuals are trained frequently and are trained with active, participatory methodologies, changes in participation can be of substantial magnitude. But in most cases only a small portion of individuals who receive civic education instruction are exposed to these beneficial pedagogical conditions. For example, only one-third of all civic education recipients in South Africa attended three or more workshops, and less than half were trained with a large number of active participatory teaching methodologies. The more intensive programs in the Dominican Republic were more clearly designed to deliver frequent exposure, yet even in that context just over 40% of civic education recipients were trained three times or more times. The results thus illuminate the difference between the potential effect of civic education on political participation and the actual effects witnessed in these democratizing contexts. Given the severe barriers to the implementation of civic education, ranging from financial constraints, logistical difficulties in reaching potential respondents, and political turmoil in certain areas, this limitation raises serious issues for policy makers regarding the feasibility of utilizing civic education as part of a democratization program in many instances (Carothers 1999). Finally, the interaction effects seen between civic education and the individual’s prior political resources also serve as a reminder that civic education cannot by itself overcome the inequitable distribution of politically-relevant resources that characterize many democratic settings. As the results from South Africa make clear, it is not necessarily the case that civic education participants are drawn 35 from the elite and participatory strata in a given country. Advocacy groups often are able to bring marginalized and previously inactive citizens into the civic education activities of the group. But, as is the case in advanced democracies (Brady et al., 1999), the result of mobilization efforts by civic education groups appears to reinforce many of the resource-based disparities in political participation in developing contexts. Individuals require sufficient political resources and sufficient opportunities to translate the mobilization appeals contained in civic education into concrete political action. 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Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 41 Table 1 Participation by Civic Education Program Dominican Republic and South Africa DOMINICAN REPUBLIC Number of Cases Control Group 1019 GAD PC ADOPEM RSM 267 222 211 318 Organized Effort to Solve Community Problem 33% 75% 64% 56% 62% Attended Municipal Meeting 13% 53% 24% 19% 25% Contacted Local Official 15% 54% 25% 16% 26% Volunteered for Local Political Post (Town Council, School Board, etc.) 12% 49% 19% 15% 19% Overall Participation Scale (0-4) ETA SOUTH AFRICA Number of Cases .73 2.31 1.32 1.07 .41 Control Group 475 LHR CLC 219 99 NIPILAR 147 Organized Effort to Solve Community Problem 38% 59% 40% 61% Attended Local Council/Government Official Meetings 30% 52% 21% 50% Contacted Local Official 14% 29% 9% 34% Worked for Party or Candidate in Election Campaign 10% 27% 9% 29% Overall Participation Scale (0-4) ETA .92 1.67 .30 Program Names, Dominican Republic: GAD: Grupo Accion por la Democracia PC: Participación Ciudadana ADOPEM: Asociación Dominicana para el Desarrollo de la Mujer RSM: Radio Santa María Program Names, South Africa LHR: Lawyers for Human Rights CLC: Community Law Centre – Durban NIPILAR: National Institute for Public Interest Law and Research 42 .80 1.73 1.33 TABLE 2A THE EFFECTS OF CIVIC EDUCATION ON POLITICAL PARTICIPATION, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC Model 3 Model 1 Model 2 Self-Selection Self-Selection With Intervening OLS Variables B s.e. B s.e. B s.e. Civic Education Programs GAD .08 .08 .08 .73 .71 .64 RSM .07 .08 .08 .31 .26 .31 PC .03 .07 ADOPEM .03 .08 Demographic Controls Age Age-Squared Gender Education Income Employed Church City .01 -.01 .27 -.04 .03 .21 -.01 .10 .01 .01 .06 .02 .03 .06 .01 .05 .00 -.01 .27 -.06 -.01 .16 -.02 .15 .01 .01 .05 .02 .03 .06 .01 .05 .00 -.01 .19 -.09 -.02 .16 -.02 .14 .01 .01 .05 .02 .03 .06 .01 .05 Political Controls Group Memberships Political Interest Media Use Voted in 1996 2.17 .19 .24 .05 .19 .03 .03 .08 2.37 .22 .23 .23 .20 .03 .03 .08 2.26 .18 .18 .19 .19 .03 .03 .08 .12 .28 .05 .04 .01 .02 .06 .04 .03 .01 .07 -1.81 .04 .26 Democratic Orientations Political Knowledge Civic Skills Political Efficacy Political Tolerance Trust in Institutions Inverse Mills Ratio (Lambda) Constant -1.09 R-Squared Number of Cases .35 2037 .09 -1.48 .24 .35 2037 Coefficients in Bold: p<.05 Italicized Bold: p<.10 43 .04 .24 .37 2037 TABLE 2B THE EFFECTS OF CIVIC EDUCATION ON POLITICAL PARTICIPATION, SOUTH AFRICA Model 3 Model 1 Model 2 Self-Selection Self-Selection With Intervening OLS Variables B s.e. B s.e. B s.e. Civic Education Programs LHR .09 .13 .13 .40 .44 .33 NIP .11 .14 .14 .47 .52 .45 CLC -.04 .12 Demographic Controls Age Age-Squared Gender Education Income Employed Race Church City .26 -.03 .32 .15 .05 .17 .29 -.03 .16 .16 .03 .08 .03 .03 .08 .13 .03 .09 .26 -.03 .32 .15 .05 .16 .29 -.03 .16 .16 .03 .08 .03 .03 .08 .12 .03 .09 .18 -.02 .24 .06 .05 .12 .23 -.03 .14 .16 .03 .08 .03 .03 .08 .12 .03 .08 Political Controls Group Memberships Political Interest Media Use Voted in 1994 Voted in 1995 1.24 .28 .15 .21 -.00 .16 .06 .06 .12 .09 1.23 .27 .15 .21 -.01 .16 .06 .06 .12 .09 1.05 .16 .10 .18 -.06 .16 .06 .06 .12 .09 .23 .06 .20 .01 .03 .04 .08 .05 .04 .02 -.01 -1.77 .07 .30 Democratic Orientations Political Knowledge Civic Skills Political Efficacy Political Tolerance Trust in Institutions Inverse Mills Ratio (Lambda) Constant -2.09 R-Squared Number of Cases .34 940 -.03 -2.10 .28 .34 940 Coefficients in Bold: p<.05 Italicized Bold: p<.10 44 .07 .28 .38 940 Table 3 Predicted Increment in Participation for Different Levels of Civic Education Frequency and Participatory Training Methodologies (A) Dominican Republic Frequency of Civic Education Exposure Percent of CE Sample 1–2 3–4 .54 .72 49% More than 4 .94 1.12 51% Percent of CE Sample 57% 43% Less than 4 Participatory Methodologies (B) South Africa Frequency of Civic Education Exposure 1–2 3–4 .65 .93 53% More than 4 1.09 1.37 48% Percent of CE Sample 67% 33% Less than 4 Percent of CE Sample Participatory Methodologies Note: Estimates based on regression models including frequency of exposure and number of reported participatory methodologies along with demographic and political controls from Table 1, Models 1 and 2. As discussed in text, Dominican Republic analysis limited to GAD and Radio Santa Maria programs and control groups (N=1562), and South Africa analysis limited to Lawyers for Human Rights, NIPILAR and control groups (N=843). 45 Table 4 Interaction Effects of Civic Education Exposure and the Individual’s Participatory Resources Dominican Republic B s.e. B South Africa s.e. .17 .24 .32 2.79 -.31 .21 .40 2.79 -.03 1.24** .19** .21** .02 .30 .04 .07 .16* 1.02 .18 .36* .08 1.03 .19 .10 .31 .17 Civic Education GAD (DominicanRepublic) /LHR (South Africa) RSM (Dominican Republic) /NIPILAR (South Africa) Participatory Resources Education Group Memberships Political Interest Gender Race Civic Education * Resources CE * Education CE * Group Memberships CE * Political Interest CE * Gender CE*Race R-Squared Number of Cases -.08* 1.72** .16* .36** .04 .45 .07 .12 .37 1532 * .02 .26* .39** -.02 -.10 .36 841 ** p<.05 p<.01 * Note: Control variables in Table 1, model 2 included in the analysis but not shown. 46 .05 .15 .14 .16 .23 Appendix Measurement of Control Variables and Sample Information Democratic Orientations Political Knowledge. In the Dominican Republic, I added the number of correct answers out of four questions concerning knowledge of incumbents and the electoral process (“when are the next presidential elections,” who is the mayor of this municipality”). In South Africa I added the number of correct answers out of four questions concerning knowledge of the institutional structure of the government (“how long is the President’s term in office,” “who has the power to decide whether a law is constitutional”). The reliability of the scale was .66 in the Dominican Republic, .76 in South Africa. Civic Skills. The questionnaire contains four questions asking the respondent to rate the extent to which “in general, you communicate your ideas with others (cooperate with other people, speak in public, know better whom to contact to get things done, direct a group) better, worse, or the same as most other people you know?” Answers of “better than” were scored as two; an answer of “same as” as one; and “worse than others” as zero. These scores were then added and divided by four to create a scale from 0 to 2. The reliability of the scale was .75 in the Dominican Republic, .76 in South Africa. Political Efficacy. Respondents in the Dominican Republic were asked three questions on efficacy, all asking the respondent to agree or disagree on a four-point scale to a series of questions concerning their views of their influence on the political system. The three questions were: (1) Sometimes politics and government are so complicated that people like me can’t understand what is going on; (2) People like me have no say in what the government does; and (3) There is no point in getting involved in politics because I would have no influence anyway. In South Africa, the first two questions were supplemented with: (1) I feel well prepared for participating in political life; and (2) If I wanted to discuss my political views, I would know where and how to contact elected officials. The reliaability of the scale was .68 in the Dominican Republic, .63 in South Africa. Political Tolerance. Respondents were asked nine standard questions to test willingness to extend freedoms of association, participation and speech to three unpopular groups in each country: atheists, racists (“persons who believe blacks to be genetically inferior”) and sexists (“persons who believe women to be genetically inferior”) in South Africa, atheists, militarists, and communists in the Dominican Republic. For each group, it was asked whether such a person should be allowed to speak publicly in your locality; should be allowed to vote, and should be allowed to organize peaceful demonstrations to express his/her point of view. Answers are on a four-point agree/disagree scale. It was found in both the South Africa survey that the questions regarding voting tolerance were distinct in respondents’ minds from tolerance for speaking in public and organizing a peaceful demonstration. I created a tolerance variable for the six non-voting questions (2 questions for the 3 unpopular groups) in South Africa by averaging the six scores; in the Dominican Republic the scale contained all nine items. The reliaability of the scale was .78 in the Dominican Republic, .87 in South Africa. Trust in Institutions. Respondents were asked how much they trusted a series of thirteen political and social institutions. I created a 0-6 sub-scale for Political Trust by focusing on the six institutions that clearly relate to institutions of the South African government (President, provincial legislature, local council, constitutional court, national government, African National Congress). In the Dominican Republic, the scale consisted of a 0-7 count of the number of the following institutions in which the individual reports Amuch trust:@ Judicial System, Police, Army, Parliament, Local Officials, Political System, and the Business Community. The reliability of the scale was .85 in the Dominican Republic, .83 in South Africa. 47 Demographic and other Control Variables Education. 7 categories ranging from no education to profession training beyond a university degree. Age. 5 categories, grouped from 18-24, 25-34,35-49,50-64, and 65 and older. Income. 7 grouped categories in the Dominican Republic, 15 grouped categories in South Africa. Church Attendance. Frequency of attending religious services on a 0-5 scale, 0 being “no religion” to “5” for “every day”. Dummy variables were created to signify: gender, race, urban residence, employment status Political Interest. In the Dominican Republic, I averaged two questions measuring local and national political interest on a four-point scale from “none” to “much” interest. In South Africa, a question on interest in the “current election campaign” was added, and in that country the response categories ranged from “very little” to “a great deal” of interest on a three-point scale. Media Exposure. In the Dominican Republic, I averaged two questions on a four-point scale measuring the respondent’s attentiveness to information about politics on “television and radio” and then in “newspapers” (“never” to “every day or almost every day”). In South Africa the radio and television questions were separated, resulting in a three-question scale for attentiveness, with each measured on the same four-point scale as in the Dominican Republic. Previous Voting Behavior. Respondents were asked if they voted in the previous Presidential election (1996 in the Dominican Republic, 1994 in South Africa). South African respondents were also asked if they voted in the 1995 local community elections. Group Memberships. Respondents were asked if they were members of a series of voluntary associations in each country. In the Dominican Republic, the groups were: parent’s association, peasant’s association, women’s association, union, church group, neighborhood or community group, occupational or professional association, cultural organization, sports or hobby club, or cooperative group. In South Africa, the groups were: community or neighborhood group, church group, youth group, sports or hobby club, union, women’s group, or cultural group. In each country the number of groups reported was divided by the number of groups asked about; thus the variable measures the proportion of groups asked about to which the respondent claims membership. The reliability of the scale is .57 in the Dominican Republic, .70 in South Africa. 48 Table A-1 Characteristics of Civic Education and Control Group Samples, Dominican Republic Participación Ciudadana LOCATION National Sampling method N La Vega Sampling method random, from lists 250 Civic Education Program GAD ADOPEM Radio Santa Radio Santa Maria Maria (indirect) (direct)13 random, from lists14 247 N San Pedro de Macoris Sampling method N San Cristobal Sampling method N Herrera Sampling method N Sabana Perdida Sampling method N TOTALS Control Group random stratified 695 random, from lists random, from lists 20115 152 snowball from RSM-Direct participants 153 189 random 50 random 50 random 50 random 250 247 201 152 153 13 50 2084 The Radio Santa Maria project was a training of trainers activity. The implementing organization only maintained lists of the "direct" participants or trainers that it trained. After interviewing the "direct" participants, the interviewers would ask for names of "indirect" participants they had trained who would then be interviewed. This second set constitutes the "indirect" respondents. 14 The national sample for the GAD program excluded Santo Domingo. 15 The total N of 201 for the ADOPEM program was drawn from San Pedro de Macoris, San Cristobal, Herrera, and Sabana Perdida as well as from La Vega. 49 Table A-2 Characteristics of Civic Education and Matched Control Group Samples, South Africa PROVINCE Civic Education Program CLC-Durban NIPILAR LHR Total N 100 150 225 Control Group 475 14 11 25 10 8 7 14 11 25 10 8 7 30 55 5 AREA Eastern Cape Mt. Fletcher Qumbu Free State Bethlehem Bloemfontein Botshabelo Phuthaditjaba/Witsieshoek Gauteng 30 30 Bronkhorstspruit Johannesburg KwaMhlanga/Bronkhorstsp ruit Pretoria Soweto Vaal Area West Rand (Johannesburg) 20 Mpumalanga Northern Province Cornfields Durban Eshowe Muden Pinetown River View Sankotshe 20 5 10 30 KwaZulu-Natal 25 5 5 10 25 25 13 25 12 25 25 100 Bosbokrand Dennilton Graskop Leandra Siyabuswa 25 10 15 15 30 10 10 Lebowakgomo Nebo Nebo/Sekhukhune Pietersburg Warmbaths 5 10 25 8 8 10 30 50 9 25 5 10 5 10 55 25 13 25 12 25 25 125 10 15 15 5 10 55 18 10 8 10 9 55
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