In searching for answers as to why young people differ vastly from their parents and grandparents when it comes to turning out the vote, A New Engagement challenges the conventional wisdom that today's youth is plagued by a severe case of political apathy. In order to understand the current nature of citizen engagement, it is critical to separate political from civic engagement. Using the results from an original set of surveys and the authors' own primary research, they conclude ...

The 2008 presidential election provided a "perfect storm" for pollsters. A significant portion of the population had exchanged their landlines for cellphones, which made them harder to survey. Additionally, a potential Bradley effect -- in which white voters misrepresent their intentions of voting for or against a black candidate -- skewed predictions, and aggressive voter registration and mobilization campaigns by Barack Obama combined to challenge conventional understandings about how to...

In searching for answers as to why young people differ vastly from their parents and grandparents when it comes to turning out the vote, A New Engagement challenges the conventional wisdom that today's youth is plagued by a severe case of political apathy. In order to understand the current nature of citizen engagement, it is critical to separate political from civic engagement. Using the results from an original set of surveys and the authors' own primary research, they conclude ...

An urgent case for protecting public education, from one of America's best-known education expertsIn this landmark book, Diane Ravitch - former assistant secretary of education and a leader in the drive to create a national curriculum - examines her career in education reform and repudiates positions that she once staunchly advocated. Drawing on over forty years of research and experience, Ravitch critiques today's most popular ideas for restructuring schools, incl...

Political campaigns today are won or lost in the so-called ground war--the strategic deployment of teams of staffers, volunteers, and paid part-timers who work the phones and canvass block by block, house by house, voter by voter. Ground Wars provides an in-depth ethnographic portrait of two such campaigns, New Jersey Democrat Linda Stender's and that of Democratic Congressman Jim Himes of Connecticut, who both ran for Congress in 2008.Rasmus Kleis Nielsen examines how Ame...

Where did we lose our idealism and why and at what cost?' In these conversations with people of a younger generation Mamphela Ramphele responds to the growing despair among young South Africans about the cracks that are appearing in our system of governance and threatening the idealism of the country that reinvented itself with the dawn of democracy in 1994. She shows incisively how successive post-apartheid ANC governments have betrayed the nation for a culture of impunity among those clo...

This book examines the conceptual foundations of participatory approaches to building local institutions and builds an analytical framework in which civic participation is viewed as a potential solution to specific civil society, market, and government failures. It then uses this framework to review the evidence on the efficacy of participatory pproaches to problems of development nd to identify the ways in which bserved policy choices for inducing participation are intimately shaped nd const...

A preeminent sociologist of race explains a groundbreaking new framework for understanding racial inequality, challenging both conservative and liberal dogma.In this timely and provocative contribution to the American discourse on race, William Julius Wilson applies an exciting new analytic framework to three politically fraught social problems: the persistence of the inner-city ghetto, the plight of low-skilled black males, and the fragmentation of the African Ame...

How "colorblindness" in policy and personal practice perpetuate racial inequity in the United States today.Following the civil rights movement, race relations in the United States entered a new era.Legal gains were interpreted by some as ensuring equal treatment for all and that "colorblind" policies and programs would be the best way forward. Since then, many voices have called for an end to affirmative action and other color-conscious policies and programs, and e...

The Internet is facilitating a generational transition among American political advocacy organizations. This book provides a detailed exploration of how “netroots” advocacy groups - MoveOn.org, DailyKos.com, DemocracyforAmerica.com, and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee - differ from “legacy” peer organizations. It also explains the partisan character of these technological innovations.

This book analyzes three previous major change efforts, outlines their strengths and limitations, and offers a successful and sustainable fourth way to integrate teacher professionalism, community engagement, government policy, and accountability.

The question of whether political, fiscal, and administrative decentralization improves government effectiveness is hotly debated among researchers and policy makers. Decentralization, Democracy, and Development contributes to the empirical literature on decentralization and the debate on whether it is a viable and desirable state-building strategy for post-conflict countries.This book is a collection of eight papers written by nine authors who were intimately involved in the complex decentra...