Contemporary Political Participation and its Countervailing Effects on Civic Culture

Citizen participation stands as a pillar of democracy, embodying principles of popular sovereignty, government accountability, and public trust. This compiled volume expands our understanding of the many varied contemporary forms of political participation and unpacks the implications of contemporary civic engagement on civic culture. The motivating factors for and effects of political participation are complex. The ways in which humans use the varying avenues and opportunities to engage with the government have been complicated by the increasing ubiquity of social media. Under certain conditions, citizen participation may serve to increase trust in public institutions, with implications for civil service, courts, police, the military, and other public services. While at other times, modern political participation may create a countervailing influence on productive civic engagement and civic culture. Although technological advances of the twenty-first century have lowered some of the barriers to political engagement, they have also facilitated new ways of spreading disinformation and simplified messaging. This edited volume will be of interest to anyone who cares about political participation and the efficacy of civic engagement in the information age. In addition, this book would be of interest in many interdisciplinary courses from the social sciences and would facilitate discussions surrounding the varied ways that citizens can use political participation in democracies around the world to engage with democratic government and the impacts this has on social capital and civic culture.

Alexandra Cockerham, Ph.D. is an Associate Teaching Professor at Florida State University in the Interdisciplinary Social Sciences program. She is the Director of the Public Policy Certificate, and her teaching interests center on Public Policy, American Politics, quantitative methods, and Political Institutions. Dr. Cockerham has published in the Juvenile and Family Court Journal, State and Local Government Review, The Florida Political Chronicle, and Presidential Studies Quarterly. She was also recently awarded a grant by the North Carolina Department of Public Safety that examined the effect of teen court programs on youth recidivism, a project that combined data analysis, community surveys, and program evaluation.

James Cockerham, Ph.D. is an Assistant Teaching Professor at Florida State University in the Public Safety and Security program. His teaching and research interests sit at the intersection of public administration, criminal justice, and public policy. He brings several years of experience in state and local law enforcement to his academic work and currently serves as a Reserve Officer with the Tallahassee Police Department. He has also worked as a civil and criminal justice researcher for the Florida Legislature, where his work informed policy analysis and legislative decision making. Prior to joining Florida State, Dr. Cockerham served as Department Chair of Health Science and Public Service and Program Director of Public Administration at Montreat College. His scholarship has appeared in the Juvenile and Family Court Journal, The Florida Political Chronicle, and the Christian Business Academy Review, and he has co-authored multiple policy reports for the Florida Legislature. More recently, he was also the Principal Investigator on a grant funded by the North Carolina Department of Public Safety examining the impact of teen court programs on youth recidivism.

government accountability, public trust, civic engagement, Twitter, disinformation, simplified messaging, citizen participation, grassroots participation, police accountability, law enforcement transparency, jury nullification, participatory democracy, citizen activism, Conspiracy expression, civil society, Rwanda, post-conflict democracy