National Service as Civic Education? (original) (raw)
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Political and Social Dimensions of Civic Engagement: The Impact of Compulsory Community Service
Politics & Policy, 2012
In 1999, the Canadian province of Ontario joined a number of other jurisdictions in requiring its high school students to complete volunteer service before graduating. The primary objective of this program, and others like it around the world, was to address declining civic engagement within society. Using a quasi-experimental design, we explore the impact of mandatory volunteering on its stated aims. Our findings suggest that volunteering in high school has positive impacts on the political dimensions of a student's subsequent civic engagement, measured here as political involvement, political activism, political interest, and political efficacy. However, those impacts are largely conditional on two features of the volunteering experience: sustained commitment to one placement and a positive experience as evaluated by the student. High school community service seems to be unrelated to social dimensions of civic engagement, measured here as involvement in a variety of social, cultural, and religious organizations.
Civic Engagement and Patriotism
Social Science Quarterly, 2011
Objectives. Recent research has shown a link between patriotism and civic participation. This research assumes that the causal arrow flows from patriotism to civic participation, but a counterperspective in the social capital literature assumes that causation runs in the opposite direction, from civic participation to patriotism. I seek to untangle these relationships by positing a bicausal relationship between these beliefs and actions. Methods. I use a structural equation model of survey data from the 2004 American National Election Studies. Results. The findings show that constructive patriotism promotes civic participation, and that civic participation separately increases constructive patriotism. Conversely, I also find that blind patriotism lowers civic participation, and that civic participation lowers blind feelings. Conclusions. This research provides a fuller picture of the relationship of patriotism with civic participation than has been provided previously in political theory or political psychology. These results are then tied to a current debate about the benefits of civic education and service learning.
Military Service as a Process of Political Socialization
Despite Israel’s adoption of universal conscription, one third of Israeli citizens avoid military service. We utilize the deviance from conscription to investigate the function of military service as a process of political socialization. This article provides an empirical examination of the effect of service in the Israeli Defense Forces on political attitudes. We test a hypothesis derived from the theory of national integration of the armed forces. That is, military experience raises consciousness of national security and produces an uncompromising defensive attitude toward the occupied territories. Data are from the Democracy Survey conducted in February 2007 among a representative sample of the Jewish population. The research design of our study applies propensity score analysis to produce as-if randomized treatment and a control group, almost the same as groups without military experience, and to control confounding variables. We demonstrate that conscripted Jewish citizens hold a similar distribution to non-drafted Jewish citizens in the categories of satisfaction with democracy, Zionist identity, opinions about leadership, and national pride. However, our analysis shows a counterintuitive result, that the experience of military service prompts opposition to Arab emigration and support for territorial concessions in the West Bank for the conflict resolution. The result is implicated in a reexamination of the theory of national integration of the military service.
Longitudinal and Life Course Studies
This paper examines the role of different types of post-compulsory education in determining civic engagement (political interest and election participation) in England and Germany. The educational systems of England and Germany provide ideal comparators for investigating the social benefits of education, in particular those that accrue from vocational education. The paper uses two longitudinal panel surveys, the British Household Panel Survey and the German SocioEconomic Panel for empirical purposes. Contrary to our expectations, our findings revealed few differences between the two countries: the level of political interest is the same for youth who had a vocational degree as those without any further qualifications, in both England and Germany. Similarly, greater levels of interest in politics were observed in adulthood for youth who had achieved academic qualifications in both countries. Likewise voting behaviour in particular was associated with the achievement of academic qualifications in Germany and to some extent with the achievement of mixed vocational and academic qualifications in England.
Measuring the Civic Duty to Vote : A Proposal
Civic duty is a central concept in the study of turnout, yet little attention has been paid to how it should be measured. After a careful review of previous measures we constructed an original battery of 13 questions that were administered in a survey conducted in seven countries at the time of the 2014 European election. We show that the battery indeed taps the duty construct. We then propose a reduced battery of four questions. We show that the four questions achieve good fit measures and pass several tests of robustness and validity across the seven countries. We invite researchers to implement this battery in future research.
Compulsory military service as a social integrator
2020
Compulsory military service has become very rare over the last 30 years, in the western world. In the past, most countries considered military service as a socialisation platform, given the fact that most of the population was recruited and military units were a "meeting point" for different cultures-because of that the service then was functional as a social integrator. The current research studied changes in social attitude during compulsory military service in Israel, where the society is considered to be essentially divided around ethnical and national issues. This study is based on an analysis of the attitudes of 3200 internet questionnaire participants via social networks in Israel, followed by a U-test of the collected data. Half of the participants were high-school students (average age 17) and half of them discharged soldiers (average age 23). Analysis of the results reveals significant evidence: discharged soldiers tend to be more tolerant then high-school students with regard to other cultures and ethnic origins. A discharged IDF soldier is less afraid of security threats and considers budget prioritisation towards social welfare to be more important than security challenges. These findings show that compulsory military service can still be effective as a social integrator, even in the post-modern world where countries are dealing with migration issues and ethno-national tensions.
Estudios Sobre la Economía Española, 2006
There is a large amount of evidence that shows higher levels of schooling are associated with a substantive increase in civic engagement. We empirically discuss this issue using Spanish data. In order to identify the existence of a possible causal link ...
Does Civic Participation Stimulate Political Activity
Activists are the engines of social movements. What spurs their activism? This article scrutinizes the role of civic participation in stimulating political action. We examine how the type of voluntary organization, scope of involvement and intensity of activity relate to political activity. Contrary to existing studies that collapse noninstitutional political activities into a single measure, we differentiate collective activities from individualized activities, enabling us to investigate how the type, intensity and scope of civic participation differentially stimulate political activities. Our sample included 14,787 participants in 71 street demonstrations. We show that membership and interest in activist organizations stimulates political activity, especially for those actively involved and especially for collective non-institutionalized activities, while membership in leisure organizations only stimulates individualized political activities, but not collective activities. We therefore conclude that civic participation is a multifaceted phenomenon associated with various political activities in different ways.
The concept and determinants of civic engagement
Human Affairs, 2017
Civic engagement plays a prominent role in sustaining a strong civil society and a vibrant democracy. However, it is a complex multidimensional concept, taking multiple forms and encompassing a variety of behaviours and actions related to both political and social aspects. Drawing on the relevant literature the paper attempts to clarify and pinpoint the notion, specifying its dimensions and mapping out its determinants. Then, focusing on university students, it moves to examine youth civic engagement in Greece, examining the extent of their civic participation and its determinants. After controlling for sociodemographic factors it finds that interpersonal trust, religiosity and political ideology affect students’ likelihood to be civically engaged.