Civic life in its healthiest state is a dynamic, open, and reflective system that serves the needs of the public and improves the quality of life for all its members. A vibrant civic sphere helps citizens become less vulnerable to exploitation, hardship, harm, and allows everyday voices access to the powers that influence their lives.Yet most citizens today feel that the political arena has become too hostile, irrational, and polarized to expend their energy trying to affect it. Texas in particular is experiencing some of the lowest levels of civic engagement in the nation. The framework of this report holds on to both the notion that a healthy civic sphere is vital to the social fabric of our nation and to idea that citizens have legitimate reasons why they do not currently engage more in the process. These new dynamics in the landscape of political life warrant a moment of reflection which this retrospective seeks to offer. This paper uses Current Population Survey data from the U.S. Census Bureau to explore whether we are we asking the right questions, if we have enough information, and outlines what the data we do have is telling us about civic life in Texas. / text

This research examines the difference in civic participation between Korean and Canadian citizens in two categories – social engagement (participation in general social groups) and political activity by using the Korea Social Integration Survey (SIS) and the Canadian General Social Survey (GSS). According to the results of this study, Canadians show higher social engagement than Koreans, while Koreans exhibit higher political activity, showing higher combined civic participation between individual citizens. This heightened civic participation by Koreans also reflects a stronger sense of collectivism. The results of the analysis on the effect of civic participation for each country show that, in Korea, both trust and sense of belonging were positively associated while in Canada, trust was negatively associated, and sense of belonging more positively associated than in Korea. The difference between the two countries can be attributed to the negative association found in institutional confidence as well. In Canada, active participation in politics implies that civic participation is part of more forward-looking action that shows greater individual preference and intention in comparison to civic participation of Korean citizens influenced more by collectivism. As such, this research implies that Korea needs to enhance individual civic identity in order to overcome collectivism. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

Young people in the Western world demonstrate that they have little connection to democratic processes through their increasing absence from the polls at election time. This trend is evidenced in New Zealand where the secondary school curriculum has little content concerning electoral and political processes. Low voter turn-out is particularly prevalent in the triennial local body elections where only a small proportion of all eligible voters participate.This research is based within two North Shore City secondary schools and has two objectives. The first to establish the current understanding of Year 13 students of the local authority, its activities, governance and decision-making processes and the second to assess the effect of this information on the election activity of the participants. Following the provision of this information to the selected classes and after 2004 local authority elections, the same classes completed questionnaires to ascertain whether their participation (voting and non-voting) in the elections was affected by this intervention. A post-election focus group of non-school-based newly eligible voters enabled some qualitative inquiry into rationale and attitudes.The findings indicate a wide degree of ignorance and reinforce the current political situation where young people see no relevance to them of local authority politics. The research highlights the need to engage young people in civic matters and increase their ownership of and involvement in the democratic process.

Communications scholars recognize two related trends in twenty-first century politics: the rise of information and communications technologies promising major changes in civic participation and a growing disconnection between citizens and their governments. The coexistence of these trends raises some interesting questions about the role of ICTs for enabling new forms of civic participation. How can new technologies better enable civic participation? This report proposes a typology for evaluating online civic participation projects that allows researchers to analyze the goals, designs, and outcomes of particular projects. The typology also incorporates Arnstein’s (1969) ladder of citizen participation in order to enumerate the relationships between the project’s goals and its outcomes and to provide a flexible model for understanding the democratic conceptualizations manifested in particular projects. The report analyzes three online civic participation projects, highlighting their innovations and discussion their levels of citizen participation. The analyses suggest that a project’s goals, designs and outcomes are related to, and inform, its desired and realized levels of citizen participation. The review also suggests clarifications to Arnstein’s ladder for future use in understanding online civic participation. The report’s evaluative typology can aid in the interpretation of past online civic participation projects and guide the conceptualization and implementation of future projects in order to facilitate the development of more direct connections between citizens and governments and more open and transparent democratic governance structures. / text

Young people in the Western world demonstrate that they have little connection to democratic processes through their increasing absence from the polls at election time. This trend is evidenced in New Zealand where the secondary school curriculum has little content concerning electoral and political processes. Low voter turn-out is particularly prevalent in the triennial local body elections where only a small proportion of all eligible voters participate.This research is based within two North Shore City secondary schools and has two objectives. The first to establish the current understanding of Year 13 students of the local authority, its activities, governance and decision-making processes and the second to assess the effect of this information on the election activity of the participants. Following the provision of this information to the selected classes and after 2004 local authority elections, the same classes completed questionnaires to ascertain whether their participation (voting and non-voting) in the elections was affected by this intervention. A post-election focus group of non-school-based newly eligible voters enabled some qualitative inquiry into rationale and attitudes.The findings indicate a wide degree of ignorance and reinforce the current political situation where young people see no relevance to them of local authority politics. The research highlights the need to engage young people in civic matters and increase their ownership of and involvement in the democratic process.

The Vietnamese have been resided in Czech Republic since 1950s. Literature claims that the Vietnamese is a rather successfully integrated group in Czech Republic comparing with other minority. Hence, the master thesis aims at exploring the political participation as well as civic engagement of university students with Vietnamese ethnicity and are conceived as second generation of the Vietnamese group in Czech Republic. Based on a review on literature on theories and relevant studies on political participation, the research employed qualitative approach through semi-structured interviews with 15 Vietnamese university students in Prague. Analysis of the responses demonstrates that most of the participants perceive political participation as their duty of citizenship and do not link their political participation with minority identity. Meanwhile, a distinction of attitude towards civic engagement and political participation for the target group and the trend of replacing political activities with civic activities is discovered. At the end of the research, this study indicates that conventional theories of political participation are not be able to cover the complexity of political participation in the modern society. Keywords Vietnamese minority, political participation, civic participation, minority...

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In order to understand the motivations and driving factors that encourage individuals to join the political sphere, as volunteers, the individual’s stories and background will be examined through an exploratory study without any initial hypothesis. Utilizing qualitative research methods, this study will directly look at the lived experiences of political volunteers that drive campaigns and candidates in Colorado’s 5th Congressional District. A greater understanding for both the factors that compel an individual to enter the political sphere in the first place as a volunteer as well as variables that persuade the volunteer to continually stay active will be analyzed. Results: Based off of 10 different interviews with registered voters in Colorado’s 5th Congressional District, this thesis found significant differences in motivations varying from party affiliations, religious values, as well as relationships with the campaign staff.

This thesis explores the emergence and proliferation of public consultative bodies (PCBs) in contemporary Russia. Created by the government and regulated by law, PCBs are formal groups of NGO leaders, academics, journalists, entrepreneurs and public figures selected by the state, that perform advisory, monitory and support functions to government departments and individuals at federal, regional and municipal levels. The concept of obshchestvennyi kontrol’ (public scrutiny) is employed by Kremlin to refer to the dual activities of oversight and assistance, which PCBs are intended to enact. First appearing ten years ago with the foundation of the Federal Public Chamber in 2004, there are now tens of thousands of PCBs in operation across the country. This thesis constitutes the first systematic analysis of PCBs in English. It uses a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach in order to explore the extent to which the portrayal of PCBs in government discourse corresponds to the practices enacted through these institutions in three regional case studies of Moscow, St Petersburg and Samara. It finds that although PCBs are presented by federal and regional leaders as means for citizens merely to assist the authorities in the performance of tasks decided by the state, in practice PCBs can enable citizens modestly to influence policy outcomes and occasionally to shape public agendas. They therefore cannot be dismissed as mere ‘window dressing’ for the authorities. The thesis shows that PCBs were created as part of the market reform of the Soviet-era public sector, in which processes of privatisation, outsourcing and decentralisation reduced the state’s ability to make public policy without input from domestic non-state actors. It argues that the limited participation in governance afforded to citizens through PCBs exemplifies practices of ‘authoritarian neoliberal governance’, a concept that captures the attempts by the state to control policy outcomes produced through new public participatory mechanisms arising from the marketization of state bureaucracy. Although the thesis focuses on the case of Russia, the concept of ‘authoritarian neoliberal governance’ raises the question of the existence of commensurable mechanisms in other non-democratic polities.

Voluntary participation of citizens in formal organizations is considered an important indicator of an efficient civic society. It is also one of the assumptions of functional democratic regime. In this diploma thesis, I explain the differences between countries in civic involvement with general characteristics of national cultures. These characteristics were clearly described and defined by Geert Hofstede. I use his dimensions in this paper. The paper should contribute to understanding the motivations for engaging in formal organizations. As it proves that commitment is significantly related to the culture of the nation (especially to the cultural dimension Uncertainty Avoidance), it is clear that the change in the activity of citizens can be very slow and the differences between nations are likely to remain.