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Main description: Too young to vote or pay taxes, teenagers are off the radar of political scientists. Yet civic identities form during adolescence and are rooted in experiences as members of families, schools, and community organizations. Flanagan helps us understand how young people come to envisage civic engagement, and how their political identities take form.

Too young to vote or pay taxes, teenagers are off the radar of most political scientists. Teenage Citizens looks beyond the electoral game to consider the question of how this overlooked segment of our citizenry understands political topics. Bridging psychology and political science, Constance Flanagan argues that civic identities form during adolescence and are rooted in teens' everyday lives--in their experiences as members of schools and community-based organizations and in their exercise of voice, collective action, and responsibility in those settings. This is the phase of life when political ideas are born. Through voices from a wide range of social classes and ethnic backgrounds in the United States and five other countries, we learn how teenagers form ideas about democracy, inequality, laws, ethnic identity, the social contract, and the ties that bind members of a polity together. Flanagan's twenty-five years of research show how teens' personal and family values accord with their political views. When their families emphasize social responsibility--for people in need and for the common good--and perform service to the community, teens' ideas about democracy and the social contract highlight principles of tolerance, social inclusion, and equality. When families discount social responsibility relative to other values, teens' ideas about democracy focus on their rights as individuals. At a time when opportunities for youth are shrinking, Constance Flanagan helps us understand how young people come to envisage the world of politics and civic engagement, and how their own political identities take form.

In this commentary, I summarize three teaching practices that nurture the democratic dispositions of students. The common element in these pedagogies is extending youths' interactions with others whose backgrounds differ from theirs and broadening youths' perspectives about the interdependence of their fates with the fates of others.

Constance Flanagan and Peter Levine survey research on civic engagement among U.S. adolescents and young adults. Civic engagement, they say, is important both for the functioning of democracies and for the growth and maturation it encourages in young adults, but opportunities for civic engagement are not evenly distributed by social class or race and ethnicity. Today's young adults, note the authors, are less likely than those in earlier generations to exhibit many important characteristics of citizenship, raising the question of whether these differences represent a decline or simply a delay in traditional adult patterns of civic engagement. Flanagan and Levine also briefly discuss the civic and political lives of immigrant youth in the United States, noting that because these youth make up a significant share of the current generation of young adults, their civic engagement is an important barometer of the future of democracy. The authors next survey differences in civic participation for youth from different social, racial, and ethnic backgrounds. They explore two sets of factors that contribute to a lower rate of civic engagement among low-income and minority young adults. The first is cumulative disadvantage—unequal opportunities and influences before adulthood, especially parental education. The second is different institutional opportunities for civic engagement among college and non-college youth during the young-adult years. Flanagan and Levine survey various settings where young adults spend time—schools and colleges, community organizations, faith-based institutions, community organizing and activism projects, and military and other voluntary service programs—and examine the opportunities for civic engagement that each affords. As the transition to adulthood has lengthened, say the authors, colleges have become perhaps the central institution for civic incorporation of younger generations. But no comparable institution exists for young adults who do not attend college. Opportunities for sustained civic engagement by year-long programs such as City Year could provide an alternative opportunity for civic engagement for young adults from disadvantaged families, allowing them to stay connected to mainstream opportunities and to adults who could mentor and guide their way.

Social trust (i.e., beliefs that people are generally fair and trustworthy) is important to the functioning of democracies and trend studies show it has declined. We test hypotheses concerning the development of these beliefs in adolescence. Based on surveys of 1535 adolescents collected over two years, we find that middle and late adolescents had significantly lower levels of trust than early adolescents and that these beliefs became more stable and less related to interpersonal trust between early and late adolescence. Results of multiple group SEMs revealed that, regardless of age, adolescents' reports that a strong sense of student solidarity characterized their school significantly increased ST at T2, controlling for levels at T1, and opportunities to exchange perspectives with fellow students increased ST at T2 indirectly, through feelings of student solidarity. The study points to the role of schools in nurturing the democratic dispositions of younger generations.

The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the transformation process in a youth group's conception of itself and its role in assuming responsibility for alcohol, tobacco, and other drug use in the community. Building on a technology-based community program, an adult facilitator invited adolescents to collaborate on a youth-produced film that would encourage peers to adopt an ethic of social responsibility for one another. In this article, a framing metaphor is used to discuss the unique potential of film for enabling youth to redefine social issues (in this case, health and responsibility), the importance of an adult facilitator's role in providing alternative frames to the status quo, and the essential role that reframing plays in social change.