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…

Late in 2018, the California Department of Education rolled out an updated version of the California School Dashboard. This revision altered the look and feel of the Dashboard and added new indicators based on newly available data. This brief updates a 2018 analysis of the Dashboard. First, I examine whether the state's revisions are in line with…

Latent transition analysis was used to examine civic engagement transitions across 2 waves spanning 8 years in a sample of AmeriCorps participants and a comparison group (N = 1,344; 77% female). Latent indicators of civic engagement included volunteering, community participation, civic organizational involvement, local and national voting, civic…

This article tests whether the form of decision-making used in school environments affects pupils' views on the legitimacy of the decisions made, and of the decision-making procedure. Building on political science theory on democratic decision-making, it compares pupils' reactions towards decisions made by pupil councils, by pupils via referendum,…

A substantial literature has studied gender differences in political participation in Western industrialized democracies, but little is known about such gaps in sub-Saharan African nations. Using 2005 Afrobarometer data, this paper presents a systematic investigation of the gender gap in political participation across 18 sub-Saharan African…

Adolescent voluntary associations are particularly well positioned in the life course to encourage voting as youth become full citizens. Extracurriculars socialize students into voting by habituating them to civic engagement and by connecting them to politically engaged cultures. We establish this argument by testing the effects of high school…

The persistence of adolescents' political attitudes and behaviors into adulthood is a perennial concern in research on developmental psychology. While some authors claim that adolescents' attitudinal patterns will remain relatively stable throughout the life cycle, others argue that the answers of adolescents in political surveys have but a…

This paper explores the position of a group of immigrant youths from the European republics of the former USSR on participation in public life in Israel, as expressed in their attitudes toward voting in the 1996 national elections, the first in which the youths were eligible to take part. The study group consisted of 30 18-year-old high school…

This report provides international benchmarks to help states see how students are doing in math and science within an international context. It shows how state-by-state results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) can be linked with nation-by-nation results from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study…

The use of ecological regression in voting rights cases is discussed in the context of a lawsuit against Los Angeles County (California) in 1990. Ecological regression assumes that systematic voting differences between precincts are explained by ethnic differences. An alternative neighborhood model is shown to lead to different conclusions. (SLD)