The Informed Political Participation of Young Canadians and Americans
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Political knowledge is an important precondition of voting and other forms of political participation. Both knowledge and participation have declined among young people in many industrialized democracies. Comparative analysis is important for understanding the causes of these declines and proposing reforms. This paper is based on the results of CIRCLE’s Civic and Political Health of the Nation Survey (2006) and a Canadian survey designed to be comparable conducted that same year. The results indicate that knowledge is indeed a correlate of participation; that American young people have troubling gaps in political knowledge, even compared to their Canadian peers. In Canada, especially in Quebec, political knowledge and participation among young people correlate with traditional political processes (such as party membership and mobilization), whereas in the United States, the link is stronger with voluntary, nonpartisan activity such as community service. Indeed, the US often relies on a Tocquevillian idea that nonpartisan civil society is the seedbed for political participation; civic engagement programs for young people often emphasize service rather than political knowledge. The paper suggests that this is an inadequate approach, especially if the goal is to increase the political participation of youth who can be categorized as “potential political dropouts. ” Young people in Quebec are in a school environment where discussing politics is the norm – unlike elsewhere in North America, but more like Europe. The paper recommends that North Americans look in particular at Scandinavia, where government programs subsidize newspapers and otherwise encourage the dissemination of political information targeted especially to less advantaged youth and adults. www.civicyouth.org
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".