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American democracy fosters the common good of society by allowing citizen involvement in government. Sustaining American democracy depends on civic involvement among citizens. Civic involvement, which consists of citizens' informed involvement in government, politics, and community life, is a desired behavior among adult citizens in the United States and it is a desired outcome of higher education. However, people in the latter part of the twentieth century have questioned the extent to which higher education makes a difference in civic involvement among adults in the United States. College educators are challenged to explain the relationship between higher education and civic involvement among adults in the 1990s. The purpose of the present study is to investigate the relationship between higher education and civic involvement. The researcher approached this issue by examining relationships between measures of civic involvement and personal characteristics such as education level, race, gender, age, and socioeconomic status among adults in the United States. The researcher compared joint relationships between civic involvement and personal characteristics among college graduates with the joint relationships between civic involvement and personal characteristics among adults with some college education and adults with no college education. Data from the Adult Civic Involvement component of the National Household Education Survey of 1996 (NHES:96) were analyzed. This survey was conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics. Using list-assisted, random digit dialing methods and computer assisted telephone interviewing techniques, data were collected from a nationally representative sample of non-institutionalized civilians who were eighteen years of age or older at the time of the survey. Data were collected regarding respondents' (a) personal characteristics, (b) use of information sources, (c) knowledge of government, (d) community participation, and (e) political participation. The selected technique for analyzing data was canonical correlation analysis (CCA), which is a form of multivariate analysis that subsumes multiple regression, multivariate analysis of variance, and discriminant analysis. The results revealed that civic involvement among adults in the United States is moderate at best. Low to moderate civic involvement among adults is mostly attributed to the absence of civic behaviors among adults with no college education. Among adults, overall civic involvement has strong relationships with education level, race, gender, age, and socioeconomic status. While the relationship between higher education and civic involvement is strong, there are significant differences in civic involvement among college graduates when grouped according to race, gender, age, and socioeconomic status. White male college graduates with high incomes tend to demonstrate the attributes of civic involvement to a greater extent than other groups. Among adults with some college education, overall civic involvement is characteristic of older males.Similarly, older adults with no college education demonstrate civic involvement to a greater extent than younger adults with no college education. These findings are consistent with the results of previous studies. The findings also extend the results of previous studies by explaining the relationships between civic involvement and multiple personal characteristics when analyzed simultaneously. The findings suggest a need for ongoing analyses of civic involvement among adult citizens and among college students. The results further imply a need for college personnel to identify and implement strategies that will improve the civic outcomes of higher education for minorities and females in various age and income categories. / Ph. D.

Although the United States is the world's leading consumer nation, limited empirical research exists on the relationship between consumer choices and political participation. This study provides the first quantitative analysis of the demographic characteristics, motivations, and political activities of political and ethical consumers in the United States. Ethical consumers are broadly defined as socially responsible consumers including the subset of political consumers. Political consumers, while also socially responsible, are primarily concerned with achievement of political or social change through purchasing decisions. While political and ethical consumers engage in similar behaviors, the distinguishing factor between the two is motivation. Participation in both political and ethical consumerism is measured through buycotting (intentionally purchasing) or boycotting (intentionally abstaining from purchasing) of particular products or companies. Based on data from the 2002 National Civic Engagement Survey II, this study finds income and education significantly predict participation in political and ethical consumerism, while race and gender do not. Across political parties, the stronger a respondents' political affiliation, the less likely they are to boycott or buycott. This study also finds the primary motivation of participation for 80 percent of boycotters and buycotters is altruistic (ethical consumerism) rather than the achievement of political objectives (political consumerism). Additionally, political and ethical consumers indicate little belief in the ability for their purchases to alter business practices and do not consider their actions a part of organized campaigns. Political and ethical consumers are politically active and individuals who contact public officials, protest, and sign email or written petitions are significantly more likely to boycott or buycott than those who do not. In lieu of these findings, suggestions are offered to consumer-activist groups and social change organizations concerning rationales of consumer motivation and political engagement in the hopes this information will be utilized to mobilize a broader base of citizen-consumers. / Ph. D.

Newspapers have been shown to have positive correlations with their readers, sense of community, political participation, and civic engagement. Using McMillan and Chavis, Sense of Community Theory and its accompanying SCI-2 as well as questions on demographics and media use, political participation, and civic engagement, this thesis conducts a survey study of two community newspaper readerships in differing locations within the continental United States. This study aims to discover and develop further understanding of the social, political, and community-building effects of community dailies and their mirrored-content news websites. First, it examines media consumption preferences and measure the sense of community (SOC) felt by readers of print-edition newspapers and their mirrored-content websites. Second, it examines the differences in SOC felt by print and website readers. Third, it examines the influence of SOC and print-news website-reading on political participation, and fourth, it examines the influence of SOC and print newspaper-website reading on civic engagement, both with the intent of discovering how SOC might mediate this relationship. This thesis will provide contextual information and build a case for the relevance of community dailies in an ever-increasingly fast-paced, technocentric society. Findings include a significant relationship between SOC and both print and online readers, and the question of whether readers of both print and online community news feel a stronger SOC than either on its own is answered. Further findings include newspaper website-reading shares a significant relationship with both political participation and civic engagement, and print does not. Implications and limitations are discussed. / Master of Arts

This study took a novel experimental approach from the field of cognitive linguistics to quantitatively describe the impact of culture on the use of mobile information and communication technology (ICT) in the context of peace and conflict. Beginning with the hypothesis that ICT reflects a mono-cultural perspective for collecting and organizing information, this study tested how a failure to adapt at a cognitive level resulted in distorted narratives. This distortion has problematic implications for democratic participation in postconflict contexts and in data aggregation initiatives that inform policy decisions related to governance, election monitoring, human rights abuse reporting, and conflict management more broadly. Fieldwork from the Acholi region of Uganda supported the conclusion that current ICT tools used in conflict management contexts fundamentally distort the narratives they were designed to collect at a cognitive level. Findings from this research also presented avenues for software development around a new variable for cultural communication preference.

Proponents claim that the convenience of early voting increases voter turnout by reducing the time and effort to vote through expanded opportunities for participation beyond "traditional" in-person voting at polling places on election day. Yet, anecdotal evidence suggests that reforms intended to make the voting process easier do not have the same effect throughout the electorate. Instead, early voting is likely to exacerbate the lack of ability to meaningfully participate in the electoral process for those particularly vulnerable to the costs of voting. Fundamentally, early voting requires access to postal services to receive and return an early ballot by-mail, as well as the ability to travel to an early in-person voting site. The irregular mail delivery operations and long traveling distances common throughout Indian Country suggests that systems of early voting lack viability on reservation lands. This research asks how the costs of voting for Native Americans affects their participation in systems of early voting. To investigate this relationship, I elucidate the social, economic, cultural, political, and geographic factors that render political participation more difficult for Native Americans. By comparing voter turnout in the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections among reservation voters on the Navajo Nation to non-reservation voters in Apache, Navajo, and Coconino counties in Arizona, I find that reservation voters prefer to vote in-person on election day while non-reservation voters prefer to vote early. I also find that early voting turnout among reservation voters increased between 2012 and 2016, however, further analysis demonstrated that turnout was higher in reservation precincts with greater access to postal services. These findings illuminate our knowledge of the convenience of early voting and add to our specific understanding of the factors that affect Native American political participation. / Master of Arts / Early voting has become a popular alternative to the civic tradition of voting in-person at polling places on election day. During the 2016 presidential election, millions of American voters cast their ballots early, either by-mail or at early voting sites. These expanded opportunities for participation allow voters to avoid the hassle of large crowds and restrictive hours at the polls. Proponents claim that by making the voting process easier, early voting also increases voter turnout, yet anecdotal evidence suggests that the convenience of early voting is not enjoyed equally by all voters. Instead, Native American voters are at a likely disadvantage with regard to early voting due to the irregular mail delivery operations and long traveling distances common on reservation lands. Of course, access to mail and transportation are required to vote by-mail and early in-person. This research asks how the costs of voting for Native Americans affects their participation in systems of early voting. To investigate this question, I examine the costs of voting and voter turnout for reservation voters on the Navajo Nation compared to non-reservation voters in Apache, Navajo, and Coconino counties in Arizona. I find that political participation manifests differently for both groups; reservation voters prefer to vote in-person on election day and non-reservation voters prefer to vote early. Although it was significantly higher among non-reservation voters, early voting turnout increased among reservation voters between the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections. However, further analysis demonstrated that turnout is affected by proximity to post offices or other postal service providers. These findings suggest that Native American political participation is made more difficult by social, economic, cultural, political, and geographic barriers and that reforms to make the voting process easier do not reduce these costs of voting.

No description available.

Zugl.: Göttingen, Univ., Diss.

Scholarly interest for the impact of technologies on democracy has raised in parallel to the decline of political participation. Technology has often been seen as either one of the causes of the crisis of representative democracy or as a powerful remedy to heal the negative externalities generated by party oligopolies. <p>The study of the impact of new media in party politics or presidential elections dates back the forties (with the outgrowth of radio) and has evolved in cyclical waves until today, covering the emergence of television, the development of global telecommunications, the birth of internet and finally what’s popularly called the Web 2.0.<p>The notion of eDemocracy emerges from this dynamic, but is in a league of its own. <p>There is no agreement on many of the terms that one needs to use to dissect its meaning. Scholars diverge on virtually every foundational concept: from the very definition of democracy and interactivity, to the core functions of political parties, to the definition of propaganda as opposed to political communication or to political marketing. As a consequence of this, there is little agreement on both what could be done in theory with eDemocracy and what is actually done in practice. <p>A permanent tension exist between idealtypes and real types in this domain. <p>The aim of this research is to prove this thesis with the largest and most global research unit of political parties web sites at the time of writing. <p>The choice of an information architecture approach has allowed to cover some uncharted territory while providing a first set of data on the structures of the political web (in 2004-2005) for public scrutiny. <p>The core of this research contribution consists in a basic taxonomy and a set of data (on the intentions and on the information architecture) resulting from a 10 years observational research on the early actors of the political web (stricto sensu i.e. 2073 political parties web sites), reviewed with a new degree of detail (through an ad hoc software procedure aiming at dissecting the structure of political web sites) and grouped into 3 main families (protosites, mesosites and neosites) of party web sites. These clusters of homogeneous web sites share a common way to deal with space, with files, with usability, with multimedia. <p>Classic views on eDemocracy insisted on the improvement deriving from more political information online: in theory, the more information we have, the more we can compare it and use it for our political orientation/participation. In practice, to describe the problem in cybernetic terms, this empirical research shows that load appears to be an issue for most party sites: there is too often either too little content (one out of five party sites around the world is a "protosite") or too much (11% of the observed universe materializes in real “content caverns”). A little more than 4% of the sites (a high end mesosite or neosite) had between 10000 and 48,000 links !<p>Cyber optimists have seen in the proliferation of party web sites a sign of improved party competition. For political minorities or for incumbent parties, in the political web, like in eCommerce, what really makes the difference is the conversion rate i.e. the number of visitors that turn into involved voters. Now, with the type of technical, socio-economical constraints reducing the widespread access to the net, with motivational factors (trust and degree of social connectedness) that may alter the individual’s response to the online information offer, with the imperfect implementation (in terms of usability) of the information architecture requirements for optimal political persuasion and communication online, the actual conversation rate of political parties web sites is likely to remain modest. <p>One of the most characteristic uses of the political web discovered in this research is to provide cloud like archival services for the party community. Parties - in the first ten years of the political web - were trying to check mainstream media and use their sites as a low cost, contemporary version of the party newspapers of the 70s. <p>Although this dissertation is not investigating the specific impact of party sites, the structural analysis carried out in the empirical validation suggests that the architecture of party sites in the years 1995-2005 was developing in such a way to be less and less capable of injecting meaningful inputs in the circuitry of modern democratic institutions. Engaged in a frontal competition with traditional news media (and deprived of the same assets), the early political web stricto sensu (and the set of interactive applications it contains) seems to be too a weak vector to channel adequate stimuli to alter and modify electoral processes or institutional dynamics.<p>The majority of the respondents of a political webmasters survey (107 individuals responded to the survey) carried out in the course of this research project indicates that the party site is not the party's leaders favourite platform to launch messages (64% of the answers disagree or strongly disagree to the statement). The majority of the respondents in the same empirical fieldwork agrees to the following statements: “the web is not the most important tool for the party communication strategy (58%)”, “key messages are published simultaneously on all media available (77%)”, “the party has created this site to allow people to contact candidates directly (63%)”, “the biggest part of the interaction with the public happens live, in meetings - the web is used essentially to post the party documents and to give news to the electorate (73%)”.<p>The most interesting results of this question are related to the transactive / mediating role of party communication online. It is beyond any doubt that in the view of these respondents their site has not been created “to invite the opposition to discuss with us (81%)”. If there is a politically relevant process that goes on in these sites it’s really among like-minded. <p>The mission statement [our party site is meant] “to gather the wants and needs of the electorate” splits respondents in two (54% of the respondents agrees and 47% and disagrees), but 73% of all respondents also agrees that most of the interactions with the electorate are non mediated, thus limiting the relevance of the political web stricto sensu to a mere information delivery platform. <p>The central thesis emerging from this first major reality check of the political web is that the structure of most party sites is simply not made to generate the ambitious levels of deliberative democracy. Not only a large number of party sites are microscopic, but they lack the basic means for human to human interactivity, a criticism that .In 34,7% of the cases scrutinized in the survey the sites lacked even of the mailto command (used to allow end users to write mails to the webmaster). In 51.9% of the cases there is no form at all, to facilitate structured communications between the party and the audience. The majority of the early actors of the political web were not structured to engage in deliberative activities. Only a fraction of the universe (between 1 and 2%) showed multiple forms and input methods corresponding to advanced neosites (along the model of the US Green Party Action Centre) or the so called over exposure sites (such as the Argentinian Humanista party). The bottom line is that interactivity levels found – worldwide - on the largest array of political parties sites were (in the period between 1995 and 2005) simply discouraging, if one tends to believe in the rhetoric of eDemocracy. <p>A corollary of my central thesis is that the reality of the political web generated by parties between 1995 and 2005, shows a significant presence of techniques and communication forms typical of political marketing and propaganda. ‘Commands’, calls for ortopraxy, confrontational communication and a growing number of ‘digital tricks’ structure the toolbox of the best party web architects. A form of weak propaganda (the only sort of ‘naked hand’ propaganda that most political parties can afford to pay) has invaded and captured cyberspace. And the user community is becoming increasingly aware of this.<p>This research does not cover the user dimension. However marginal data obtained in one of the three empirical sections (the Web Master survey) seem to indicate that the political web (of the early years) maintained the capacity to swing some marginal seats. <p>This research covers forms of interactivity based on BBS, online fora and blogs but does not cover the historical period of the development of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. The scientific conclusions are therefore intrinsically limited in value to the decade they refer to, but it is argued in the conclusions that recent surveys (Internet and Campaign 2010 Survey by Pew) do not seem to indicate that the so called Web 2.0 is drastically changing the levels of online political participation. <p> / Doctorat en Information et communication / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished