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This chapter aims to strengthen the empirical and conceptual understanding of the links between civic participation and the social network structure of social capital. It provides an analysis of original survey data that uses a position generator instrument, and considers some previous research.

The chapter proceeds in four parts. The first section addresses the liberal assumptions of the First Amendment and how these contribute to moral minimalism in journalism. The second section discusses various conceptions of citizenship and relates these to a communitarian framework for understanding civic participation. The third section explains how journalism can contribute to the common good by exercising and promoting epistemic responsibility. The fourth section discusses the implications of this argument for what counts as excellent news, which journalists are responsible for offering to citizens to aid their flourishing.

This chapter examines participatory democracy in youth-led community organizing. It discusses the elements and forms of participatory democracy and the evolution of civic participation. It then reviews literature on participatory democracy.

This chapter is based on the findings from national research commissioned by the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), which aimed to examine the differences between ethnic groups in terms of levels of non-political civic participations, and the motivations and barriers to civic participation. Although it is recognised that civic participation has the potential to promote and encourage self-confidence, this chapter discusses the importance of self-confidence in enabling and motivating people from ethnic minorities to take advantage of civic participation opportunities. The chapter recommends that policies to encourage participation and inclusion should progress beyond information access. They should instead include active consultation with communities and community leaders, and recognition of the importance and potential of political identity and confidence in enhancing civic participation amongst ethnic minorities.

Can we achieve a common life and also support thriving private lives? In this concluding chapter, I ask if Rousseau held a dominant, normative view that informed his various depictions of social and personal health and healing. Finally, I suggest what Rousseau has to offer to us, to practitioners of twenty‐first century democracy. It is precisely the chaos of Rousseau's life and tangles of his thought that make him useful for exploring the irregular contours of the public and private. The tensions and complexities of life alone and life together branded, seared, his work. Self‐possession and civic participation, private safety and public belonging, personal aesthetics and shared pleasures – these goals, commitments, and ideals animated Rousseau as he sought to capture them, all of them, in his life and thought. His failures are evident enough. But the attempt remains worthwhile.

This chapter provides a comprehensive account of immigration to Greece during the past 15–20 years. It reviews the main demographic features of the immigrant population, discussing critically the main developments in Greek immigration policy since 1990, and explores the immigrant adjustment “model” Greece has adopted. The chapter reveals that after nearly 15 years of massive migration, the country still strives to accept its role as a host society. Migration policy planning lacks a mid- to long-term perspective. Immigrant integration policy needs to be reconsidered to address the social and economic challenges of migration. At the same time a proactive migration planning and a realistic migration control policy are necessary to manage migration through legal channels, avoid the proliferation of undocumented migrants, and combat human trafficking in the region.

This chapter looks at private letters and other unpublished sources about defendants other than the Keyserlings to recapture the subjective experience of being investigated, not as an exercise in voyeurism but to explain why the effects were so profound. The experience of being under loyalty investigation produced a wide range of responses from individuals and had many long-lasting effects—on their economic security, mental and physical health, personal relationships, and civic participation. Many loyalty defendants preferred to remain silent about these humiliating experiences, but examining them is necessary to establish the context in which these people made difficult strategic and ethical decisions about how best to protect themselves.

Responding to academic and policy anxieties about apparent youth disengagement from politics and civil society, this chapter asks what role the internet has come to play in young people's civic participation. It provides an overview of key findings from the 7-country EU funded CivicWeb project, which involved three main forms of investigation. First, a textual analysis of the technological affordances, pedagogies, and ideologies in play on youth civic websites; second, focus groups and a survey to discover whether and how young people are involved in civic action on- and offline, their general and specific motivations, and the constraints on their participation and third, producer interviews and civic website case studies to find out how organisations with varying aims and funding models might use the Web more effectively to promote civic education, engagement, and action among a broader spectrum of young people. The conclusions challenge current orthodoxies about young people, about the Internet, and about civic participation.

Emphasizing the formation of the power-capital culture as the price of China’s economic development, chapter 3 studies the emergence and characteristics of the power-capital culture. It uses the civic culture as an analytical reference in discussing the common characteristics of both the Confucian culture and Chinese Communist culture in terms of their lack of individual rights, civic participation, and social tolerance. Based on case studies of the Sichuan earthquake and the Beijing Olympics in 2008, chapter 3 argues that the new, hybrid power-capital culture denotes limited civic participation in the political process and selective social tolerance. The chapter also proposes a “triangular framework” to reflect on the uniqueness, utilitarianism, and endurance of the resultant Chinese political culture.

This chapter focuses on the reconvergence of history and political science and explains how historians and political scientists can work together towards reconstructing political history. It argues that political historians who want to truly reconceptualize the study of politics must draw on scholarship in political science to think of fresh approaches and frameworks that move beyond the liberal presidential synthesis. It discusses various areas in political science, some well established and others just emerging, that historians would find extremely useful; these include civic participation, the relationship between race and politics, and international political economy. The chapter also examines what contributions historians can offer to political science beyond providing them with more data and concludes by highlighting disciplinary diffrences that historians and political scientists must respect and should not abandon.

This chapter examines how municipal accommodation influences immigrant political incorporation. Will municipal accommodation enable immigrant participation, or will it dampen foreign-born mobilization? Specifically, the chapter analyzes prevalent local government efforts to hire and appoint immigrant intermediaries, who connect officials and immigrants who are otherwise separated by linguistic and cultural barriers. Survey data reveals that even beyond new immigrant destinations, local government officials often rely on such individual intermediaries rather than turning to immigrant organizations identified in past literature. Immigrant intermediaries can open productive communication channels between officials and immigrant leaders as well as sometimes engaging additional newcomers in local civic participation. That said, local officials act on their own incentives to accommodate immigrants and therefore do so in ways that disproportionately benefit established and immigrant elites rather than immigrants more broadly.

Juan R. Martinez’s chapter argues that religious institutions today offer unique resources that encourage civic participation among non-citizens. Drawing on five years of ethnographic fieldwork, the chapter shows that social movement organizations apply and customize recognizable aspects of religious culture to promote progressive values and action among undocumented immigrants. By using religion to cast undocumented immigrants as deserving citizens, these organizations generate religious meaning that encourages calls for citizenship and civic engagement among marginalized populations.

This chapter explores previously hidden consequences of the transformation of volunteering and civic life in the empowerment projects during the last twenty years. In contrast to hierarchical social relations, empowerment projects aim to promote civic participation and help the needy, while also fostering transformation and innovation as well as sustainability. Drawing on a nearly five-year-long ethnographic study, this chapter considers the language used to the work of empowerment projects and the relevance of equality to the very existence of such initiatives. It also highlights the tensions between helping the needy, documenting accountability and transparency, and being “soul-changing” for those involved. It shows that those who are supposed to become “empowered” are forced to manage unintended contradictions between rhetoric and reality. In their effort to mesh civic participation and helping the needy, volunteers tend to ignore inequality and social conditions.

This chapter examines local political participation in the Prairie Crossing project and how it differs from national participation. Local political participation is defined as being involved in private government through the Prairie Crossing Homeowners Association and voting in county, township, and municipal elections; national participation is defined as voting in national elections and engaging in political activity such as working for a candidate, attending a political rally or meeting, and influencing others to vote. Using questions taken from the American National Election Studies (ANES) database, the chapter compares the political participation of Prairie Crossing's residents to that of the national cohort. In particular, it discusses the voting behavior of Prairie Crossing residents as well as their record of public service involving the environment, education, water policy, and state, county, and municipal government. It also asks whether Prairie Crossing has helped in changing the culture of civic participation at both the local and national levels.

This book has explored how different cultural, economic, and political backgrounds have given rise to very different third sectors worldwide, especially in terms of state involvement with nonprofit organizations. It has demonstrated how globalization and technological innovations have spurred global convergence on some trends, such as environmental concerns. It has shown that the third sector can offer powerfully positive solutions for political and social life, including service, innovation, advocacy, expressiveness, and community building. To conclude, it discusses four global themes that provide options for consideration by policymakers: third sector interaction with the state; the role of civil society in promoting civic participation; the use of third sector organizations as tools of political legitimacy; and the continuing tensions among the five institutional logics (clientelism, paternalism, bureaucracy, activism, professionalization) as a key part of the ongoing transformation of the third sector.

This chapter examines new paradigms of civic participation among Mexico City's youth. In recent years, international human rights organizations have stressed the need for participative democratic change in Mexico City. In response, the Federal District's left-wing administration has enacted a series of laws, including the Federal District Act for the Rights of Boys, Girls and Adolescents and the Act for the Federal District's Youth in 2000, a law to foster citizen participation in 2004, and the act for the prevention and eradication of discrimination in 2006. However, a gap still exists between the legal sphere and the implementation of social policies that manage and provide democratic spaces for the real practice of citizenship. This chapter discusses the demographics of youth activists in Mexico City as well as their educational trajectories, families, organizations they are involved in, social identities, motivations for engagement, social awareness, and political ideas.

This chapter discusses methods of data collection and analysis that can be used to gain deeper understanding of processes of prefiguration. Prefigurative politics can be described as a set of political practices based on the understanding that “the ends a social movement achieves are fundamentally shaped by the means it employs, and that movements should therefore do their best to choose means that embody or ‘prefigure’ the kind of society they want to bring about” (Leach, 2013 p. 1004). Prefigurative politics therefore entail the practices that are put in place to reflect and work toward achieving a vision that is held by and for a community in connection to a social movement. Focusing on feminist prefiguration to promote women’s civic engagement in rural Nicaragua, I discuss the role of grassroots partnerships as a method of prefiguring a more just and globally inclusive psychology.