A New Engagement? Political Participation, Civil Life, and the Changiing American Citizen (review)

A New Engagement? reports on an impressive array of new survey data on the civic and political engagement of Americans. The authors are interested in the same set of questions that have long animated students of American politics: What is the extent of citizen participation? Why do some participate and others do not? What kinds of beliefs do Americans hold about citizenship, democracy and government? Their central argument is that the engagement of younger Americans – that is, those born after 1965 – has changed character more than it has declined. Younger Americans are actually equally as likely to participate in civic life as are older citizens. They also find evidence that personal boycotting and "buycotting," the purchasing of a product because one supports the values of the company selling it, is widespread among all Americans. More than a third of all adults have done so in the past year, and the authors argue this kind of activity is an example of the ways in which citizen engagement is changing forms. They use results like these to offer an explicit challenge to the standard view of engagement in the United States being in gradual but persistent decline. They are hopeful that new forms of civic engagement offer the possibility of a reinvigorated political system. At the same time, however, they also confirm the well trod conclusion that traditional forms of political engagement have fallen off among all Americans, precipitously so among the younger cohorts.

The breadth of data the authors bring to bear on their questions is impressive, and there is a lot of rich material here that will be of broad interest to scholars of American politics and public opinion. Their indices of civic and political engagement offer an excellent array of measures for these concepts. Their findings regarding how civic and political participation differ across age cohorts, the high levels of consumer-oriented engagement among all cohorts, and the emerging attitudinal profile of the youngest cohort (which they term the "DotNets") are all important contributions to the literature. The last half of Chapter 5, which offers specific findings about what kinds of activities and community service programs in schools encourage longer-term citizen involvement, would be of particular use to high school teachers and administrators. The book as a whole is clearly written and accessible to a general audience.

The underlying logic of their analysis focuses on the connection between attitudes and behavior. Thus, they conceptualize how people feel about the political arena, their communities, social and political issues, and so forth as the prime movers in how individuals engage in politics and civic life. This approach teaches us a lot, but it also tends to obscure the structural elements of civic engagement and disengagement. The role of citizen voice is being both quantitatively and qualitatively changed by such structural forces as the changing organization and authority of the workplace, suburbanization, the professionalization of voluntary associations and their consolidation to Washington DC, and the increasing dominance of politics by large corporate dollars. Changing individual attitudes are almost certainly one factor in the changing patterns of civic and political engagement, but they are not the only factor or even the most important factor.

Their reliance on survey data is also a peculiar choice, given their explicit desire to focus on new ways in which Americans might be civically and politically engaged. Surveys work best when the types of behavior of interest are already known. New forms of civic and political participation, if truly novel, would be difficult to discern from a standard battery of survey questions. The authors do report on focus group data they also collected, but the results are used only for narrative color in the book. The surveys do all the empirical heavy lifting. Moreover, the logic of their argument based on this data does because circular at times. In several places...