During 2008, SIAP collaborated with the Americans for the Arts’ Animating Democracy project on a review of the literature on civic engagement and the arts. Based on that review, SIAP considered the theoretical and methodological issues and developed a comprehensive strategy by which policymakers, researchers, and practitioners could improve evidence and advance understanding of the civic impact...

The positive and negative influences of violent/action games, henceforth called ‘‘action games’’, remains controversial in the scholarly literature. Although debate continues whether action games influence aggressive behavior, little research has examined the influence of action games on civic engagement. The current study addresses this gap by examining the correlation between exposure to acti...

Europe and North America, whereas ethnic nationalism is dominant in Central and Eastern Europe. After laying out the civic-West/ethnic-East argument. it refines the civic/ethnic dichotomy and deduces the state policies that flow from ethnic, cultural, and civic conceptions of national identity. It then employs survey data from 15 countries to measure mass conceptions of national identity by ana...

Background. In China, and throughout the world, there is everincreasing interest in civic engagement and older adults. Civic engagement can be construed as an element of the broader theoretical framework of social capital. Social capital, which has been defined as “features of social organisations such as networks, norms, and trust, that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefi...

Transparency of government inspections enables citizens to pressure companies and public organizations into behaving according to their demands. This paper reports an empirical study into the effects of the increased transparency of inspection services on civic competence. Civic competence is defined as a citizen’s ability to accomplish public tasks. The study indicates that, although citizens ...

Political researchers point to church activities as a major avenue for lower-class individuals to learn the civic skills necessary for many forms of political participation, the skills that higher-status individuals learn through education and occupation. This article tests this theory through multilevel analyses of the effects of both individual income and average congregational income on thre...

Using data from approximately 30,000 individuals in over 30 countries, we find evidence that an individual’s pro-environment attitudes and behavioral intentions to pay higher taxes to protect the natural environment are positively associated with her attitudes toward civic cooperation. The influence of civic cooperation on environmental attitudes varies with the level of development and the env...

Organizations aiming to foster civic engagement, such as government bodies, news outlets, political parties, and NGOs, struggle to purposefully use social media to engage young people. To respond to this challenge we conducted five group-interviews with 27 youth, 16–26 years, about their experiences of and barriers to civic engagement in social media. Our paper contributes to identifying specif...