The Importance of Political Context for Understanding Civic Engagement: A Longitudinal Analysis

We contend that political context is important to consider when analyzing social capital and that context has an important but neglected impact on understanding the consequences of civic activity. Our focus is on the influence of rural, local leadership in two Minnesota communities and policies that these elites have developed to bring Internet connectivity to their citizens. One city developed a community electronic network and the other opted for an individualistic, entrepreneurial approach to information technology. Using a quasi-experimental research design and four-wave panel data, we find that elite policy approaches interact with civic activity to predict technology use among citizens, even long after the policies’ initial implementation. In the city with a community network, residents who are integrated into civic life are able to harness these political resources to become more technologically sophisticated.

The 2008 Election

The 2008 presidential election will be significant both for domestic and for foreign policy. Issues of security in domestic policy will continue to trump issues of freedom. The difficulties of resolving our military presence in Iraq will be the first among many important issues the new administration must confront. In both domestic and foreign affairs the new administration will have to deal with the unanticipated consequences of inherited policies even as it creates its own agenda and its own set of unintended consequences.

Investigating the Roots of Civic Morality: Trust, Social Capital, and Institutional Performance

In the last decade considerable research in social sciences has focused on interpersonal trust, treating it as a remedy for most maladies modern democracies suffer from. Yet, if others act dishonestly, trust is turned into gullibility, thus mechanisms linking interpersonal trust with institutional success refer implicitly to honesty and civic morality. This paper investigates the roots of civic morality. It applies hierarchical models to data from 38 countries, and tests the individual, community and structural explanatory factors. The results of the analysis point to the relevance of an institutional dimension, both in the form of individuals’ perceptions as well as the quality of governance: confidence in political institutions and their objective quality are the strongest predictors of civic morality. At the same time, the findings show that the recently popular claims about the importance of social capital for citizens’ moral standards are largely unfounded.

Close But Not Close Enough

The authors comment on an earlier aritice in Society by Eugene Goodheart and offer a novel hypothesis about the origins of religion.

The Phenomenon of Death

Daniel Callahan’s essay raises big and important questions about how the biotechnological project to extend life and defeat aging may bring many undesirable consequences. At worst, it will usher in a new age of extended debility, with able minds trapped for decades in enfeebled bodies or able bodies lingering for decades with enfeebled minds. At best, our future success at extending vigorous life will create serious disruptions of the social order. But the essay fails to illuminate, more fully, the nature of death as a human problem, or to establish the basis for setting limits on the worst excesses of the bio-immortality project.

Manufacturing Trust: Community Currencies and the Creation of Social Capital

In this study I examine whether an innovative government program in Ichikawa, Japan has been successful in increasing the level of generalized interpersonal trust in the community by rewarding civic participation by local citizens. Japan has sponsored the development of a number of “community currency” programs at the local level that are designed to create social capital. A community currency is a local “money” that is only useable within a neighborhood or town. In a typical community currency program, a town rewards civic volunteers with credits to barter with other citizens, use at participating stores, or pay for town services. These programs are specifically designed to stimulate generalized trust by rewarding civic engagement and encouraging social interaction. I evaluate whether the new Tekona community currency program in Ichikawa, Japan has been successful in raising levels of trust among participants, as compared to a randomly selected control group of town residents. I find that community currency involvement increases general trust, which demonstrates that it is possible to institute government programs that create social capital.

And the question is? Knowledge growth in welfare policy research

This study examines how federally sponsored research questions about welfare policy have evolved from 1981 to 2001, through a content analysis of Requests for Proposals (RFPs). We treat the RFP as a document that identifies what information is sought as well as what is treated as established knowledge. Results show that research questions represent a mixture of constancy and change. The greatest similarity in research questions is in the areas of employment and earnings/income, with greater variability in the areas of family formation and child outcomes. The research questions, notwithstanding their sophisticated terminology, often boil down to who the poor are, how welfare recipients can be coaxed or forced into the labor market, whether fundamental work supports such as health insurance and reliable childcare are helpful in sustaining employment, and whether welfare is implicated in pregnancy, marital behavior and multi-generational poverty. We interpret these findings in relation to concepts on research utilization.

Social process as everyday practice: the micro politics of community-based conservation and development in southeastern Mexico

This article explores the everyday exchanges associated with community-based natural resources management in southeastern Mexico to suggest how formal and informal social practices shape conservation and development outcomes. Discussions of social process in most policy analyses emphasize formal exchanges based in rational action but typically overlook the impact of everyday social practices, which often occur “off-stage.” First, I build on existing conceptualizations of social process in the policy sciences by exploring culturally-informed approaches focused on everyday practice, infrapolitics, and performance. Second, I present a case study detailing the emergence and decline of a timber marketing fund to reveal how informal lending among community members contributed to the decapitalization of the fund. Third, I trace flows of economic capital from the fund in order to discuss specific policy outcomes. Fourth, I present ethnographic and archival evidence showing the persistence and frequency of informal lending, the performative aspects of local social process, and the character of “off-stage” interactions. I conclude with a discussion of social process that extends analysis beyond values-based outcomes to consider how long-standing practices based in particular logics (political cultures) collide with formalized (technocratic) practices of the public sphere. I employ this conceptual approach to critically examine questions of petty corruption and local conflict, to uncover multiple dimensions of micro political interaction, and to explore how cultural perspectives on social process might inform policy responses.

Creating Chaos at the Borders

The morbidity and mortality issues likely to arise for geriatric superstars are not unlike those already realized for so-called miracle babies. The therapeutic imperative and other social pressures, the technological imperative, financial interests, and media hyping have driven the overzealous medical-science pursuits of very old individuals and very young fetal infants. This article discusses lessons learned and lessons expected.

International Obligations and the Morality of War

Americans are not as religiously divided on foreign policy questions as they are over such hot-button, culture war domestic issues as abortion and gay marriage. Nevertheless, surveys suggest that Americans’ attitudes on several foreign policy fronts are consistent with a religious worldview. This analysis draws primarily on the findings of various PRC polls to examine the relationship between religion and three areas of foreign policy: the role of the USA in the world; the nature of international obligations; and the morality of war.

Political Disagreement in Context: The Conditional Effect of Neighborhood Context, Disagreement and Political Talk on Electoral Participation

Despite scholarly interest in determining how exposure to disagreeable political ideas influences political participation, existing research supports few firm conclusions. This paper argues that these varied findings stem from an implicit model of contextual influence that fails to account for the indirect effect of aggregate social contexts. A model of contextual influence is outlined which implies that the neighborhood partisan context moderates the effect of political disagreement in social networks on campaign participation. The evidence shows that network disagreement demobilizes people who are the political minority in their neighborhood, but has no influence on people in the majority. When viewed together, these findings indicate that a person’s relationship to the broader political environment sets distinctive network processes in motion.

Antwort auf die Replik von Marc Bühlmann,Wolfgang Merkel,Lisa Müller und Bernhard Weßels zum Forumsbeitrag von Thomas Müller und Susanne Pickel

Ohne Zusammenfassung

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Why Is the Estate Tax so Controversial?

There are some social issues whose significance for society nobody would seriously question but which nevertheless receive only scarce attention in sociological research. One of these is the bequest of private wealth from one generation to the next. It is currently estimated that about 550 billion dollars are transferred annually in the United States, amounting to more than 4% of the American gross national product (Havens and Schervish 1999). Not only is this a huge amount of wealth that changes ownership, but the bequest of wealth speaks to some of the core questions of sociological scholarship.

Wie lässt sich Demokratie am besten messen? Zum Forumsbeitrag von Thomas Müller und Susanne Pickel

Ohne Zusammenfassung * Die vier Autor(inn)en arbeiten in einem gemeinsamen Forschungsprojekt des NCCR Democracy (vom Schweizerischen Nationalfonds finanziertes National Centre of Competence in Research: Challenges to Democracy in the 21^st Century) und des WZB an einem „Demokratiebarometer“ für die 30 OECD-Staaten, das die Ignoranz der 0-Varianz bei Polity und Freedom House aufkl?ren will.

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Reconsidering the Effects of Bonding Social Capital: A Closer Look at Black Civil Society Institutions in America

Few studies consider how Putnam’s bridging and bonding social capital arguments apply to voluntary associations within American minority group communities. Consequently, I examine African-American civic groups to explore Putnam’s claims about the potential negative political effects of bonding social capital. In contrast to the bonding social capital thesis, I argue that black communal associations encourage African-Americans to be involved in a variety of mainstream civic and political activities that reach beyond their own group interests. Using the 1993–1994 National Black Politics Study I demonstrate that although black organizations are predominantly composed of African-Americans and work to advance their interests, these goals are not pursued at the expense of connecting blacks to others in the general polity.

An Alternative Approach to Estimating Who is Most Likely to Respond to Changes in Registration Laws

Scholars often seek to understand which individuals are most responsive to the change in some treatment. Such work inevitably faces issues of identification. When the dependent variable is binary, the assumption that the largest effect occurs where p = 0.5 is also encountered. I apply Manski’s [(1995). Identification problems in the social sciences. Cambridge: Harvard University Press] non-parametric Bounds approach, which relaxes the functional form and distributional assumptions found in traditional models, in an attempt to resolve the long standing debate on which types of individuals are most affected by changes in registration laws. Under the standard assumption that treats the selection of registration laws as exogenous, the results revise the current understanding. By exploring the power of various behavioral assumptions, new insights into the study of policy changes emerge, calling into question some of the assumptions that are standard in the literature.

The Changing Faces of Contemporary Tourism

Tourism, a domain of considerable importance in the contemporary world, has long been overlooked by social scientists, but has recently become a field attracting a growing body of research. In sociology, the relation between tourism and modernity at first constituted the issue of principal interest, the discourse focusing on the extent to which modern Western tourists seek authentic experiences on their trip. The article discusses the changes in the terms of the discourse, contingent upon the growing similarity of the world in the wake of globalization, the emergence of the “post-tourist,” and the diversification in the composition of tourists, with the growth in the number of travelers from non-Western countries. The question of the limits of the future expansion of the tourist system is raised in conclusion.

The Limits of Political Citizenship

Policy makers tend to focus on the extension of citizenship as the primary means by which new populations become incorporated into a society. Although acquiring formal citizenship is necessary in order to participate in many aspects of a state's civic, social, and political life, the extension of legal citizenship is far from a guarantee for full membership. Instead of focusing exclusively on naturalizing immigrants, we need to consider T.H. Marshall's three spheres of citizenship—the civil, political, and social. By extending social elements of citizenship prior to or at the same time as we extend other benefits, we will move towards more complete citizenship for and greater civil and political engagement among all residents in our society—non-citizens, naturalized, and native-born, alike.

The Yardstick of Manners

The interdependence of etiquette consumers and producers makes the contemporary etiquette guide a book of rules informed by realism rather than one etched from the behavior of the comfortable. While the acquisition of good manners facilitates comfort and mobility, the yardstick of behavior, like the measure of standard language, evolves with the times and thus is never a mere instrument of conformity.

Heroic Action and Its Discontents: Safe Horizon’s Response to 9/11

Based on first-hand qualitative research, this article describes and analyzes the significant role that a local, New York City-based social service agency played in responding to 9/11; the sources of its notable ability to provide assistance to individuals and families affected by this terrorist attack; and the structural strains and unanticipated divisions within the agency that the heroism of its fervid engagement nevertheless engendered.