Civilian national service programs can powerfully increase youth voter turnout

Low rates of youth voting are a feature of contemporary democracies the world over, with the United States having some of the lowest youth turnout rates in the world. However, far too little is known about how to address the dismal rates of youth voter participation found in many advanced democracies. In this paper, we examine the causal effect of a potentially scalable solution that has attracted renewed interest today: voluntary national service programs targeted at the youth civilian population. Leveraging the large pool of young people who apply each year to participate in the Teach For America (TFA) program-a prominent voluntary national service organization in the United States that integrates college graduates into teaching roles in low-income communities for 2 y-we examine the effect of service participation on voter turnout. To do so, we match TFA administrative records to large-scale nationwide voter files and employ a fuzzy regression discontinuity design around the recommended admittance cutoff for the TFA program. We find that serving as a teacher in the Teach For America national service program has a large effect on civic participation-substantially increasing voter turnout rates among applicants admitted to the program. This effect is noticeably larger than that of previous efforts to increase youth turnout. Our results suggest that civilian national service programs targeted at young people have great promise in helping to narrow the stubborn and enduring political engagement gap between younger and older citizens.

The Development of Critical Consciousness and its Relation to Academic Achievement in Adolescents of Color

Critical consciousness, the process by which individuals come to understand, analyze, and take action against systems of oppression, is associated with several positive youth outcomes. However, little research has considered how the core components of critical consciousness (critical reflection, political agency, critical action) are associated with academic achievement. The present study explored the extent to which the developing critical consciousness of adolescents of color (N = 364) over 4 years of high school predicted academic achievement, as measured by grade point average (GPA) and the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). Results demonstrated that adolescents' critical reflection and critical action intercepts predicted SAT scores whereas critical reflection and critical action slopes predicted GPAs. Political agency was not predictive of either academic outcome.

Pushing and Pulling Emerging Adults Through College

Interview, survey, and academic transcript data with a diverse sample of first-generation college (FGC) and continuing generation college (CGC) premedical intended emerging adults are analyzed to study academic outcomes and any differences in the availability and use of social capital the first year of college. CGC students know many people with college degrees including those in careers they aspire to obtain, while FGC students do not. All students identify parents as very important forms of social capital who contribute to their success in college, but the types of support differs by educational background. Students whose parents have at least a bachelor’s degree (CGC) are “pulled” through their first year with specific advice from their parents about how to succeed in college, while FGC students are “pushed” by their parents with support. In addition, CGC students display evidence of enacting Lareau’s concept of concerted cultivation, being much more likely than FGC students to approach and gain assistance from professors, openly critiquing those professors and classes in which they are not doing well and showing a sense of entitlement to and confidence in their ability to stay on the premedical track, even when receiving low test scores.

Process and Positive Development

Volunteering among university students is an important expression of civic engagement, but the impact of this experience on the development of emerging adults requires further contextualization. Adopting interpretative phenomenological analysis as a qualitative research approach, we carried out semistructured interviews with 10 students of one Irish university who were highly engaged in volunteering. Their experience of volunteering unfolded through relatively open-ended leadership positions in university student-led societies, comparatively structured community roles, or a combination of both. The findings describe a process initiated by the decision to volunteer, a discrete task based on motives, previous history, and exposure to opportunities. The positive impact of volunteering was described through the outcomes of commitment, competence, and connection. While concerned with the values of civic engagement, the perceived self-coherence and purposefulness attributed to volunteering also referenced personal development motives. The findings are interpreted in light of the volunteer process model, positive youth development, and civic engagement. These perspectives are relevant in considering college student volunteering as an experience that can promote successful developmental transition by having a positive impact on personal identity.

The relationship between adolescents' civic knowledge, civic attitude, and civic behavior and their self-reported future likelihood of voting

A long-standing objective of American public education is fostering civically engaged youth. Identifying characteristics associated with likelihood of future voting, a measure of democratic participation that predicts future voting behavior, might yield targets for education programs to increase civic participation. Survey data from urban adolescents were analyzed to elucidate how civic knowledge, civic attitudes, and civic behaviors are associated with self-reported likelihood of future voting. In a multivariable ordered logistic regression model with latent constructs for civic knowledge, attitudes, and behavior, two civic knowledge constructs and two civic attitude constructs maintained a positive, statistically significant independent association with future voting likelihood after adjusting for race/ethnicity and advanced coursework: knowledge of American governance, current events knowledge, general self-efficacy, and skill-specific self-efficacy. Further research is necessary to determine whether education programs can intervene upon these civic knowledge and civic attitude factors to increase voting participation later in life.