Registering to Vote is Easy, Right? Active Learning and Attitudes about Voter Registration

In a democracy, agents of political socialization, such as schools and parents, generally emphasize the importance of voting. While college students may be exposed briefly to voter registration as a barrier to participation, there is little evidence that the topic is given serious attention in the classroom. This research addresses how classroom experiences affect students\u27 attitudes about voter registration by employing a quasi-experimental, pre-post survey design. The experimental stimulus was a course assignment in which students completed voter registration applications under four scenarios designed to simulate different circumstances frequently encountered by college students. The students in the experimental group became much less sanguine about the ease of registration and the ability of most citizens to correctly navigate the process, yet became more confident in the voter registration process in general. This raises interesting questions about how attitudes about the political process are shaped by students\u27 course experiences

Determinants of Rural Latino Trust in the Federal Government

Trust in government is essential to democratic practice. This article analyzed the factors shaping trust in the federal government using a survey of 260 Mexican immigrants living in rural Illinois and in-depth interviews with 32 participants. To analyze these data, we drew a distinction between support for the regime (system of government that is relatively stable in a political system) and support for authorities (those who temporarily occupy positions of power) to test whether regime or authorities’ considerations shaped respondents’ political trust. The results showed that both considerations influenced trust in the federal government. We also found that a perception of current leaders as being concerned with issues affecting Latinos and an increased optimism about the economic situation were key determinants in explaining trust in the federal government. Further, our in-depth interviews showed that respondents thought about economic issues, immigration, and overall assessments of the Obama administration when determining their level of trust in the federal government

The variant effect of decentralization on trust in national and local governments in Asia

This research responds to the need to study trust in the national government (national trust) and in local government (local trust) simultaneously and investigates how decentralization reshapes political attitudes toward different layers of government. The argument is that decentralization contributes to variant patterns of political trust, defined by the relative strength of national trust and local trust, across countries. A multilevel analysis of East Asian countries shows that decentralization nurtures local trust in democracies, but decreases local trust in autocracies. Further, decentralization boosts national trust in autocracies, but not in democracies. Such a variant effect of decentralization sheds light on regime stability and viability in democratic and authoritarian countries