| 摘要 | Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from “The Youth Unemployment Crisis: A Reference Handbook (Contemporary World Issues)” a volume edited by Christina G. Villegas.
Several years after the “Great Recession” of 2008, it was obvious that communities across the geographic and demographic board were not feeling the effects of the economic downturn similarly. Curious, the National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC) and the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning & Engagement (CIRCLE) decided to examine whether the “economic resilience” of particular communities (those with low levels of unemployment) was significantly related to “civic health” (the level of civic engagement within a community). In two successive reports, NCoC and CIRCLE argue that they found evidence of a correlation between the two: Communities with higher levels of civic engagement in 2006 suffered less from unemployment in the wake of the 2008 recession.
There is a qualifier to that statement, however; researchers found that it is “stronger social cohesion within a community” that “strongly predict[s] a smaller increase in the unemployment rate” (CIRCLE 2012). Social cohesion is a broad concept, but it is generally defined as the “degree to which residents socialize, communicate, and collaborate with one another” (CIRCLE 2012). Civic engagement, on the other hand, usually refers to a variety of disaggregated behaviors, ranging from voting in local and national elections to protesting, to joining a community group, or volunteering with a church or other association (Flanagan and Levine 2010).
Civic engagement can refer to both nonpolitical and political participation — but some political participation can actively undermine social cohesion. Civic engagement is thus not simply identical with social cohesion; civic engagement arguably can be understood as the result or expression of a prior social cohesion even as it can also be understood as a measurement of the same.
The correlation between social cohesion, civic engagement, and unemployment is complex not only because cohesion and engagement are broad and generalized concepts but also because employment and unemployment appear to have a separate bearing on an individual’s civic presence and behavior. Employment has been shown to positively affect an individual’s civic behavior and engagement, while civic engagement has been shown to positively affect an individual’s employment status. While this seems to amount to a classic chicken-and-egg situation in determining which causes which, examining the various components in more depth yields important insights into how educators, policy makers, and communities should understand the components as both a sequence and a cycle, each part of which is especially relevant to youth.
If we begin from the standpoint of unemployment, we find that those not in the workforce are typically not devoting their time to volunteering or to other civic activities. In Men Without Work, political economist Nicholas Eberstadt focuses on unworking, prime-age men (unemployed males who normally ought to be in the labor force), and then examines what activities they pursue in place of a job. Using the General Social Survey and the American Time Use Survey, Eberstadt uncovers that unworking males typically don’t devote their extra time to helping others in their family or community; don’t engage more in religious activities; and don’t have purposeful movement outside of the house.
This has further ramifications: unworking men are less likely to volunteer, read daily newspapers, or vote in presidential election years than their working peers. Simultaneously, unworking men have much higher rates of tobacco and drug use, illegal drug use, and gambling than working men, and spend considerably more hours than the latter on sleeping and self- grooming (Eberstadt 2016). Furthermore, the more time those not in the workforce in general spend not being employed, the likelier they are to develop antisocial and anti-civic behaviors and to never return to the workforce.
When we introduce the youth component to unemployment and civic engagement, we see the more nuanced interconnectedness of both, denoting a cycle that may begin in youth and continue throughout the life course. In part, the civic skills, habits, and motivations of young adults result from opportunities for engagement during childhood and adolescence. “Children and teens who have opportunities for involvement in extracurricular activities and community institutions are more likely to vote and participate in other forms of civic engagement as young adults” (Center for the Study of Social Policy 2011).
Crucially, building effective ties through participation in community organizations where members hold each other accountable for group goals shapes a young person’s civic disposition through producing trust among peers (Flanagan 2003). Building and maintaining trust with one’s peers is as key to civil and democratic societies as it is to the workplace, as it both nourishes and produces the sense of being equal stakeholders within and throughout a community. In fact, a high level of social trust is often taken for a sign of social solidarity and cohesion — and has been linked to strong economic performance (Rahn and Transue 1998). Where there is strong social trust, individuals typically embark on their social interactions assuming that those around them are of good will and benign intentions, and so give even those they do not know the benefit of the doubt. Without that social trust, individuals are unlikely to take risks in their personal or professional life, stymieing their entrepreneurial, social, and civic potential.
It’s unsurprising then, that research has shown that taking part in community service “strengthens intrinsic work values, [and] leads youth to rethink their vocational priorities, and encourages a less individualistic approach” (Flanagan and Levine 2010, 168). Civic engagement prepares young men and women for later success in the workforce because it gives the youth practical experience in accomplishing group tasks, while also familiarizing them with political institutions and social issues, and the need to consume news about and discuss with others the issues of the day. In turn, holding down a job has been linked to the “success sequence” of adulthood, in which a steady job, marriage, and parenting lead to personal success and stable patterns of continued civic engagement, which includes political participation (voting).
Civic engagement is a key part of the transition between adolescence and mature adulthood, precisely because it is through participating in community-based organizations and institutions that young people learn what it means to belong to a community — to develop shared goals, to exercise rights and fulfill obligations toward the execution of those goals, to connect personal goals to the group’s goals and thus learn to see themselves as members of the public with a shared interest in the common good (Flanagan 2003).
Typically, political engagement increases as one’s life, roles, and institutional connections in the community become more stable. But today’s youth experience a lengthening or delayed transition to adulthood, meaning that contemporary youth are taking longer to establish stable patterns of civic engagement just as they are taking longer to finish their education and to get married (Flanagan and Levine 2010). This raises the question of whether youth today have permanently weaker connections to civic life than their predecessors. There is evidence to support this, tied to the prolonged absence of meaningful civic education within public education over the past few decades. Students today spend only 7.6 percent of their school time in social studies, only one part of which is civic education — the most crucial vehicle of transmitting an appreciation of the value of the democratic political order, and inspiring the individual to invest in the practice of democracy through civic engagement broadly understood (Burgess 2017 and 2016).
For the overall social and democratic health of local communities and the nation at large, it’s vital for educators, employers, and policy makers to understand how civic education helps establish the foundation for social trust and cohesion, which in turn influences especially youth to engage civically in their larger communities and gives them the tools to transition to adulthood via steady employment. Employment and civic engagement is both a sequence and a cycle, with the most crucial intersection of both happening in the moment of youth.
References Burgess, Rebecca. 2016. “Disgusted with Trump vs. Clinton? Blame America’s Civic Education.” The Hill. October 4. Accessed April 30, 2017. Burgess, Rebecca. 2017. “Our Veterans Deserve Better.” InsideSources. November 10. Accessed April 30, 2017. Center for the Study of Social Policy. 2011. “Promoting Youth Civic Engagement.” November 15. Accessed April 30, 2018. CIRCLE. 2012. “Civic Health and Unemployment II: The Case Builds.” The Center for Information and Research on Civic Engagement. September 12. Accessed April 30, 2018. Eberstadt, Nicholas. 2016. Men without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis (New Threats to Freedom Series). West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press. Flanagan, Constance. 2003. “Developmental Roots of Political Engagement.” PS: Political Science and Politics, 36(2): 257–261. Flanagan, Constance, and Peter Levine. 2010. “Civic Engagement and the Transition to Adulthood.” Future Child, 20(1): 159–179. Rahn, Wendy M., and John E. Transue. 1998. “Social Trust and Value Change: The Decline of Social Capital in American Youth, 1976–1995.” Political Psychology. Special Issue: Psychological Approaches to Social Capital, 19(3): 545–565.
Rebecca Burgess is the program manager for the American Enterprise Institute’s Program on American Citizenship, which produces original research on civic education, the health of America’s public institutions, and the principles of American democracy. Rebecca is also an advisory board member of iCivics, an educational non-profit developed in response to the declining quality of civics education in U.S. schools. |
