Civic participation in America
By: Quentin Kidd
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2011
Place of publication: New York, NY
Language: eng
Number of pages: 195
ISBN-13: 9780230111349
Subjects: POLITICAL SCIENCE / Civics & Citizenship; Civics; Citizenship; POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Freedom & Security / General; POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Ideologies / Democracy; Political participation
Description: "The founders of the American republic saw two motivations for individual civic participation: self-interest and civic duty. This book argues that the declining nature of traditional forms of civic participation in America over the last half century are the result of the evolution of larger institutional, social, and historical forces over the course of the nation's history--the expansion of citizenship, the changing political economy, and the growth of the national government--that have altered the calculus for individual civic participation, favoring the self-interest motivation at the expense of the civic duty motivation. This broad-stroke examination of civic participation offers a useful and much-needed corrective to the more behaviorally-oriented literature on participation, which relies heavily on recent (in historical terms) cross-sectional survey research to make its case. The goal of this book is to offer a diagnosis for how America has, in the context of civic participation, found itself where it is, and to expose the deep roots that explanation has in America's history and institutions"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references.
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note:; title: Introduction: The Calculus for Civic Participation * Citizenship and Civic Participation * The Political Economy of Civic Participation * Active Government and Civic Participation * Civic Socialization and Civic Participation * Institutional Evolution, Civic Socialization, and Twenty First Century Civic Participation.