Molly W. Andolina

College Students, Faith and the Public Realm: The Relationship Between Religious Attitudes and Civic and Political Engagement

This paper explores college students’ involvement in political and civic life, with a particular emphasis on the relationship between their faith and their service. We examine who is involved outside of the classroom, what characteristics are associated with high levels of activism, and how individuals’ attitudes toward faith play a role in this process.

Speaking With Confidence and Listening With Empathy: The Impact of Project Soapbox on High School Students

Abstract This case study investigates an action civics curriculum, Project Soapbox, designed to foster key civic outcomes among high school students. Framed by research highlighting profound disparities in civic educational opportunities and the best practices of civic education programs, this article examines the democratic and literacy skills high school students report learning from participation in Project Soapbox. Data include pre- and post-surveys with 204 high school students from 9 public high schools, classroom observations, teacher interviews, student work samples, and student focus group interviews. Findings indicate that students who participated in Project Soapbox reported modest gains in their expectations for future civic engagement and expressed greater confidence in their rhetorical skills. Additionally, although this curriculum is designed to emphasize rhetorical skills and democratic orientations, some of the strongest impact appeared in students’ reports of their listening and empathy skills.

Civic Talk: Peers, Politics and the Future of Democracy, by Casey A. Klofstad

In his carefully constructed study of political conversations, Casey Klofstad provides compelling evidence for the impact of civic talk on the participatory habits of today’s young adults. Civic Talk: Peers, Politics and the Future of Democracy is a well-documented portrait of how our social network can pull us into voluntary civic life and even get us to the polls on election day. The book fills a gap in the literature on political communication and reinvigorates the importance of peers as key socializers in political life. Klofstad’s key strength lies in his synthesis of two somewhat diverse research orientations. The first, drawing from political science, focuses on individual-level antecedents and influences on political action. The second, more clearly situated in the field of political communication, documents the relationship between political behavior and one’s social network. By incorporating these two elements (the individual and his or her social environment), Klofstad attempts to address weaknesses in each area of study, although he is clearly tackling more issues in the latter than the former. Indeed, Klofstad’s most significant contribution is the way in which he addresses a long-standing issue in political communication. Specifically, while communication scholars have illustrated the connection between individuals’ political talk and their political activism, they have been unable to establish that civic talk actually leads to civic action. The relationship between the two phenomena could run in the reverse, a result of the fact that individuals who are politically active seek out political conversations. Or it could be selectivity bias (people pick their friends because they want to talk politics with them), or it could be some unmeasured influence that is affecting both variables (endogeneity bias). Here, Klofstad uses a unique data set that incorporates both a longitudinal design and an element of random assignment to provide causal evidence that “civic talk encourages individuals to participate in civic activities” (p. 30), albeit with several important caveats. The data come from the Collegiate Social Network Interaction Project (C-SNIP) at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, which surveyed incoming first-year residential students in the 2003–2004 school year. Students answered questions about their political and civic activities and orientations, as well as the conversations they had with their roommates at three separate time points: initially upon matriculation, at the end of their first year, and then again in the spring of their fourth (and, for most students, last) year of college. This panel design, along with the fact that the university randomly assigns roommates, allows