Background/Context: Robust civic engagement by young adults supports the aims of a democratic society, as well as college- and university-espoused commitments to the public good. Civic engagement also benefits students themselves. Although voting participation among young adults has shown modest increases from 2016 to 2020, work remains to be done…

Public higher education institutions in South Africa conduct Student Representative Council (SRC) elections yearly. However, there is a paucity of studies to determine factors that affect voter turnout in these elections. This descriptive quantitative study conducted an empirical analysis of factors influencing students' voter participation at…

Our scope is to show how democracy has been trivialized as a concept and, more worryingly, as a mystified practice of consented servitude, which supposedly would bring to its very end. In fact, for the emblematic occidental societies, democracy has, at the best, been reduced to a consumerist way of life, under the capitalist liberal order, and the…

In this paper, we study the role of expertise and independence on governing boards in the context of education. In particular, we examine the causal influence of professional educators elected to local school boards on education production. Educators may bring valuable human capital or experience to school district leadership, thereby improving…

The acquisition of digital skills, media diet management, and general knowledge of ICT, is essential for the development and empowerment of audiences in the current media ecology, particularly considering the political and social challenges of the Latin American environment. In that sense, the study of media competence is urgent for sizing up the…

Free college has been gaining traction as a public policy option in recent years and has been adopted in some form by at least 15 states. Enthusiasm for the idea has gained momentum with the growing realization that a healthy economy requires a well-educated workforce and that workers benefit immensely from education beyond high school. Indeed,…

There are three basic strands to our lessons. How should we teach? What skills should we enable our students to build? What content should we use to deliver those skills? In this article Tony McConnell, who has been re-designing the curriculum in his school in response to a changed examination regimen, considers the issue of subject content. With…

College students in prison are ineligible for state-funded financial aid in most states. This is because state policymakers adopted policies that explicitly ban incarcerated students from receiving aid. How and why did state policymakers do this? This study explores this question through qualitative case studies of two states where incarcerated…

Since the Great Recession, a number of public colleges and universities have become operationally vulnerable. In this article, the authors point to two related processes leading to this crisis in public higher education. The first is the recent deterioration of operational conditions for a number of public colleges and universities. The second…

The U.S. Constitution was drafted in Philadelphia from late May to mid-September 1787. The fifty-five delegates to the Constitutional Convention gathered to revise the Articles of Confederation but soon decided to write an entirely new document. These "Framers" were committed to forming a representative democracy, but their largely…

One of the most significant obstacles to inquiry and deliberation is citizenship education. There are few mechanisms for the development of citizens' democratic character within most societies, and greater opportunities need to be made to ensure our democracies are epistemically justifiable. The character and quality of citizens' interactions are…

The learning objectives of the introductory American Government course, one of the most common entry-level political science classes in American universities, span both content knowledge and civic education. Much research has shown the pedagogical value of integrated learning--taking part in active and authentic experiences with democracy at the…

The handling of linguistic diversity in the Basque Autonomous Community has been an area of constant political debate since the establishment of the Basque-Spanish co-official linguistic regime and the introduction of a process to revitalize Euskara (the Basque language) in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Much of that debate has materialized in…

How is the president of the United States elected? Why is this the method used? Is this the best and most efficient way of electing the president of the United States? Questions such as these are well suited for a mathematics discussion that promotes numeracy, because, "notwithstanding the immense value of numeracy for education and vocation,…

Commitment to democracy and democratic norms is declining to the point where many Americans question the current political system as a form of democratic governance. Americans are deeply divided along lines of social identity, political preferences, and lived experiences (Pew Research Center, 2017a). The rhetoric and divisiveness of the 2016…