This article examines enrollments in languages other than English in United States higher education from the perspective of geographical distribution. While the overall decline in language enrollments is well known, enrollments are also very unequal across states when accounting for population. By cross-referencing MLA language enrollment data…

The 1971 passage of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment to the US Constitution was a significant step in advancing voting rights that offered a new route for young people to participate in public life. While met with enthusiasm in many quarters, the question of where a substantial segment of the youth vote--college students--would cast their ballots was a…

With the world growing in complexity and interconnectedness, the demand for leaders equipped to solve compound problems will only increase. Higher education is called upon to develop leadership in students and needs to engage relevant tools and techniques to prepare students for the tasks ahead. Democratic engagement--from voter education and…

The U.S. Constitution is the most well-known governing document in the country--studied by students, endlessly interpreted and reinterpreted by judges and political pundits, and placed in the category of near-religious reverence by many Americans. In the last 50 years it has been amended exactly once, in a ratification process that took over 200…

This short report looks more deeply into the question of whether student voters make a difference to UK election results by: (1) taking the 25 constituencies with the highest proportion of full-time students -- those where they are thought to make up more than 17.5 per cent of the electorate; (2) considering the results in these seats for the last…

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…

Elections in fledgling democracies are punctuated by perceived and observed cases of vote buying otherwise also called electoral clientelism -- regarded as a major threat to democratic consolidation. Notions of vote buying are variously captured in the burgeoning literature on democracy, but the ongoing scholarly discussions have failed to engage…

Since March of 2020, two pandemics have hit the United States of America like a bag of bricks. The health pandemic as a result of COVID-19 that has killed over 180,000 Americans and the racially-charged genocides that continues to murder our Black brothers and sisters. As a result of constant disregard for Black lives, in part 1, we analyze the…

The majority of voters in South Africa still do not take democratic elections for granted, but the decline in voting participation is a cause for concern in South Africa, as in other parts of the world. In addition, widespread student protests at higher education institutions during 2015 and 2016, including those at African and South African…

As a contribution to the Teaching & Learning Symposium on Comparative Politics organized by APSA, this short article discusses the challenges in Introduction to Comparative Politics classes when comparative political behavior is examined. In the tradition of studying political participation, the discipline has witnessed the development of…

Reformers in developing countries increasingly seek to raise education quality. Yet we know little about the politics of improving education. One significant and instructive case of reforms designed to boost education quality comes from Chile, where in 2016 the government enacted a sweeping reform of teaching careers. This paper first uses a…

This annual publication is designed to be a one-stop shop for all the existing research on private school choice in the United States. This year's edition is updated with the research published since the last edition. Since the first modern-day voucher program launched in Milwaukee in 1990, researchers have studied private school choice programs.…

As a postsecondary educator with most of my experience teaching in colleges, but with some also in undergraduate and postgraduate studies both in Canada and the United States, I have been teaching politics and government for close to fifty years. That time has been spent not only undertaking empirical analyses of political behaviour and the…

The scholarship of interdisciplinarity provides a potentially powerful response to anti-intellectual and anti-democratic impulses. It recognizes that proof and disproof are generally impossible, and that scientists can be biased in their evaluation of the evidence. Yet it proposes a set of strategies for transcending scholarly disputes in order to…

Until quite recently, young people were extremely passive in political life. This has been repeatedly noted in sociological studies and in the scientific literature. In particular, young people used to be extremely reluctant to take part in elections. For example, in the age group between eighteen and thirty, 47 percent took part in the election…