Replication data for: Learning to Act: The Effect of High School Civic Education on Political Participation

Although theorists have emphasized the necessity of educating for democracy since ancient times, few studies question whether efforts to teach civic virtue translate into increased political participation. Using longitudinal surveys, student transcripts and newly collected data on graduation requirements, this dissertation demonstrates that high school civic education courses transform adolescents into citizens. While interventions such as removing barriers to registration and mobilizing partisans have received frequent scholarly attention, formal civic education has been largely ignored. The first empirical chapter addresses this gap in the literature by quantifying the effect of high school civic education on voter turnout. Using both traditional and cutting-edge statistical methods, I show that an additional year of American government coursework increases turnout during the decade following graduation. The subsequent empirical chapters give special consideration to factors that moderate the relationship between civic education and participation. In the chapter that examines the role of parents, I show that students whose parents are not politicized derive a larger benefit from civic education than their peers. Further, these students are disproportionately members of social and racial groups that are underrepresented at the polls, which suggests that civic education increases participatory equality. The remaining empirical chapters examine the influence of student age and political events. I find that completing civic education as an older student and during a presidential campaign enhance the effectiveness of the course. Taken together, the dissertation's findings are evidence of a strong interactive effect between civic education and other agents of political socialization

Evaluating Health Co-Benefits of Climate Change Mitigation in Urban Mobility

There is growing recognition that implementation of low-carbon policies in urban passenger transport has near-term health co-benefits through increased physical activity and improved air quality. Nevertheless, co-benefits and related cost reductions are often not taken into account in decision processes, likely because they are not easy to capture. In an interdisciplinary multi-model approach we address this gap, investigating the co-benefits resulting from increased physical activity and improved air quality due to climate mitigation policies for three urban areas. Additionally we take a (macro-)economic perspective, since that is the ultimate interest of policy-makers. Methodologically, we link a transport modelling tool, a transport emission model, an emission dispersion model, a health model and a macroeconomic Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model to analyze three climate change mitigation scenarios. We show that higher levels of physical exercise and reduced exposure to pollutants due to mitigation measures substantially decrease morbidity and mortality. Expenditures are mainly born by the public sector but are mostly offset by the emerging co-benefits. Our macroeconomic results indicate a strong positive welfare effect, yet with slightly negative GDP and employment effects. We conclude that considering economic co-benefits of climate change mitigation policies in urban mobility can be put forward as a forceful argument for policy makers to take action