Scholars and legal practitioners of voting rights are concerned with estimating individual-level voting behavior from aggregate-level data. The most commonly used technique, King's ecological inference (EI), has been questioned for inflexibility in multiethnic settings or with multiple candidates. One method for estimating vote support for…

Agriculture organization (AO) members are key stakeholders within the agriculture and natural resources (ANR) sector, and their engagement in policy decisions can help direct future policy formulation and implementation. Such policies and regulations are often determined by and voted upon by elected officials, and, therefore, the decisions made by…

For the past two decades, the presidency and both houses of Congress have been hotly contested by the two major political parties. Yet, geographically, the United States seems to be increasingly marked by "red" areas where the Democratic Party lacks any ability to even dream of winning office and "blue" areas where the…

School-based health clinics (SBHCs) offer convenient, free, and much-needed health services to adolescents who have been shown to lack access to preventative care and treatment. With high rates of risky sexual behavior and associated negative health outcomes, SBHCs are particularly effective in providing sexual health services. This article…

Higher levels of civic and community engagement in higher education are positively associated with students' academic performance and they also build upon citizenship skills such as informed voting. Yet, while these are worthy and important outcomes of higher education, students from disadvantaged backgrounds can have more difficulty navigating…

American colleges and universities have an expanding role to play in nurturing political engagement as more youth attend college. Given low voter turnout among college students yet growing experimental evidence that face-to-face mobilization can boost turnout, the experiment reported in this article examined the impact of a face-to-face college…

Youth civic engagement is recognized as an essential component necessary for the preservation of democratic practices; however, inadequate levels of civic participation persist among young people. Past research has shown that young people are more likely to participate in politics when they are informed. We present survey data collected from…

Governments are increasingly publishing information about the performance of the services they provide, in part to help citizens hold their elected representatives accountable for government service outcomes. Yet there is little evidence concerning the influence of information about government service performance on voter behavior. This paper…

Student exit polling has demonstrated value in the classroom (Berry and Robinson 2012; Evans and Lagergren 2007; Lelieveldt and Rossen 2009), but faculty typically operate these polls in isolation. When faculty collaborate, however, students gain additional benefits from the experience. Collaboration provides a geographically diverse "student…

Studies regularly link levels of educational attainment to civic behavior and attitudes, but only a few investigate the role played by specific coursework. Using data collected from students who attended one of four public universities in our study, we investigate the relationship between economics coursework and civic behavior after graduation.…

In the postbellum southern U.S., African Americans were steadily disenfranchised, a modern publicly financed universal school system with racially segregated schools was created, and public school monies were allocated so that white pupils received substantially more than black pupils. An earlier paper (Ng and Halcoussis 2003) established a…

Voter participation in Florida school board elections is much higher than in states where reforms were instituted in the early twentieth century to depoliticize local educational governance. These reforms served to repress participation in local elections. (Author/IS)

A study examined mass media use and ability to predict public support for two heavily publicized Florida referenda--casino gambling and a statewide lottery. It was hypothesized that (1) voters who read newspapers that publish election public opinion poll stories will be better able to predict support for the issues than voters who rely on friends…

Explores voting behavior of African Americans and whites in local school and tax referenda to determine whether racial conflict is still a primal factor in noncandidate elections. Results for voters in 5 counties in Florida (over 1,699,000 voters) reveal African-American underregistration and the continuing importance of racial cleavage. (SLD)

Voters in five states approved referenda making English their official language. The vote is used to assess racial, ethnic, economic, political, and cultural hypotheses. The racial and cultural hypotheses are not validated; the ethnic and class ones are partially supported; and the political hypothesis offers the most compelling explanation. (26…