Cultivating Democracy: Civic Environments and Political Socialization in America

Cultivating Democracy: Civic Environments and Political Socialization in America. By James G. Gimpel, J. Celeste Lay, and Jason E. Schuknecht. Washington, D. C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2003. 278p. 32. 95. Scholarly studies of political socialization began a dramatic decline during the mid-1970s. One source of this downward spiral lay in the dwindling novelty of studying pre-adults. Political scientists are accustomed to dealing with the “real world” of politics, one occupied and ruled by adults. After a prolonged lull, research began to increase in the 1990s and has continued onward. One driving force in this renewal stems from the decline in civic virtue among upcoming cohorts said to characterize most Western countries. A second influence was the crumbling of the former Soviet Union and the appearance of transitional and new democracies around the globe. In an effort to understand each of these developments and to propose possible solutions, a variety of institutions and scholars have returned to the question of citizenship development, often with the intention of improving the inculcation of civic virtue among the young.