As a faculty member involved with civic engagement for twenty years, I think that academic research and the greater good are not only compatible but inseparable. I see the eJournal of Public Affairs as the locus where quality research in the civic engagement space will come from a variety of disciplinary and scholarly approaches. I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to set the tone for this new era of the eJournal and I trust you will find that the contributions we are including here will set the bar high.
The time in which this important scholarly work has been produced could be no more poignant. 2024 is a significant year, perhaps pivotal, for American democracy and that is not something I say lightly. A confluence of forces, from decreasing trust in government and social institutions, the increasing use of mis- and dis-information on the electorate with a recent rise in use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools to legitimize such falsehoods, manipulation of electoral district composition, ideological and policy polarization, voter suppression, increasing use and acceptance of violence as a political tool, and decreasing levels of social capital and civic engagement have combined to pose the question, “Is American democracy under threat?”
Concurrent with these threatening forces, though, are concomitant efforts to boost democratic engagement in the electorate. Universities, particular through the AASCU American Democracy Project (ADP), have been leading curricular and co-curricular opportunities for students for twenty years. Scholars are actively investigating how AI is used for undemocratic purposes and how intentional use of AI can be used to build more democratic engagement, how to reduce voting barriers, create fairer distribution of electoral districts, and provide opportunities for improved mental health outcomes for those traumatized by the assault on democratic principles which has built to seemingly-critical mass in the last two decades.
The appropriate democratic response to these challenges involves more citizen participation, or civic engagement. Since civic engagement is the core topic of the eJournal, in our relaunch we aspire to make the eJournal into the leader among academic publications in the civic engagement space. I believe we have assembled a collection of scholarship for this edition that exemplifies those standards.
We start with Suzanne Walker-Pacheco, Otto Brown, Sarah Nash, Seth Andersen, and Allison Rank’s “College Students as Participants in Our Democracy: Models for Engagement.” Using a sample of programs from Missouri, Iowa, and New York, the authors provide a framework for successful institutional interventions that provide students not only opportunities to register to vote but give them agency in the programs to teach them democratic leadership skills in the process. A common thread throughout the article is the documented success these programs had in boosting voter turnout. All participating universities were part of the National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement (NSLVE) project, which provides reconciled data on student voter turnout. The availability of NSLVE’s data has led to an enhanced strategic component to voter engagement, because now universities have ways of concretely measuring the change in voter turnout before and after exposure to these opportunities.
Joseph Zompetti, Lance Lippert, and Stephen Hunt offer an incredible timely contributing with “Considering AI for the Classroom to Boost Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement.” The time for using artificial intelligence is upon us. For educators, there is considerable and legitimate fear of students using AI to complete assignments while bypassing the intellectual development process that college-level assignments shepherd. The authors’ deployment of AI tools in their classrooms provides a beginning framework for others who seek to inoculate students from AI’s worst elements while encouraging them to learn AI-management skills that will certainly be expected within the workforce once they graduate.
Amelia Minkin’s “Who Pays the Price for the Cost of Voting” uses the Cost of Voting Index to investigate whether such laws as mandatory voter identification and reduced early or absentee voting disproportionately affect persons of color. While the results indicate the effects are modest, Minkin’s analysis shows that there is a statistically significant negative effect on racial minority voter turnout under these rules.
Another controversial policy area is drawing the district lines into which candidates are elected. Gary Brinker’s “Effects of Gerrymandering on State and Social Policy” adds new insight into the gerrymandering literature. Much has been written about the effects that intentional partisan drawing of electoral district lines has on elections, policy outcomes, and the public’s sense of legitimacy for their government. Brinker’s work points out that there are distinct and significant policy effects when districts are drawn to extreme partisan advantage, particularly in social policy areas.
Amanda Maher and Brigid Beaubien’s “The Time is Now, The Time Is Always” presents a clear call to action for university faculty in the preparation of K-12 schoolteachers. Maher and Beaubien describe a curricular program where civic engagement becomes the foundation for teacher education. One of the common goals of faculty actively participating in civic engagement is to more purposefully weave the content into an ever-wider series of courses. For those interested in more intimately integrating civic engagement into the curriculum across a campus, this manuscript provides an important grounding work.
Molly Kerby’s “From Institutional Trauma to Institutional Healing” provides a case study in how the built-up effects of the last twenty years of anti-democratic forces can explode, and then how universities must respond to those traumas. The framework for institutional response presented in this manuscript not only gives practical advice for university leaders concerned about disruptive responses to political events, but a plan to build organizational resilience that helps mentor students into becoming citizens who are passionate about politics but reject the violent response that has become increasingly accepted by a disturbing large portion of the population.
In addition to these six pieces of original scholarship of engagement, this issue presents two featured contributions that will be regular components of the relaunched eJournal: book reviews and editorial content.
Keisha L. Horner’s review of Heather Cox Richardson’s “Democracy Awakening” explores the work from its origins as a series of Facebook posts into a full book tracing the rising spectre of authoritarianism in America. Hoerner’s interpretation of Cox Richardson’s conclusion, that the work of democracy is never done and that the path to authoritarianism lies in complacency, is an important reminder of why we do civic engagement work.
Finally, Ryan Weaver’s “Civic Education for Civic Leadership: Renewing Faith in Democracy,” creates some important thought prompts for those focused on strategic integration of civic engagement into the life of a university. The Strategic Impact Model is designed to build momentum to create a self-reinforcing pattern called the Civic Learning Spiral. Students (and faculty and staff) who follow this pattern should develop lifelong commitments to self-improvement through civic leadership.
As a body of work, I hope this issue will accomplish three things: First, it provides a rigorous body of scholarship in the civic engagement space; and second, it amplifies the growing call to action to make civic engagement a mission-critical part of all university life. Twenty years of effort to enhance social capital and civic engagement has been met with an avalanche of anti-democratic sentiment and policy. Generation-level commitments to civic leadership are the only high-likelihood strategies to successfully push back against the looming threat of anti-democratic action. Third and finally, I hope that this issue inspires scholars active within the civic engagement space to contribute their work here. My vision for the eJournal is that we will become known as the most impactful interdisciplinary journal in the community of scholarship of engagement. For that, we need you, the reader, to consider the eJournal for your future work, which I hope you will.
For those who missed an opportunity to contribute to this issue, there is another outstanding opportunity for you, available immediately. A colleague of whom I have the utmost respect, Dr. Jean Mistele, is the guest editor of the next special issue of the eJournal, entitled “Theory and Practice: Service-Learning, Community Engagement, and Community-Based Research.” This edition is currently accepting manuscript submissions, to which you can contribute your scholarship at: https://www.ejournalofpublicaffairs.org/callforsubmissions/.
Thank you for reading, and all you do to build civic leadership skills in our next generation of citizens and leaders.
Chapman Rackaway
Professor and Chair of Political Science, Radford University
Guest Editor, September 2024