This paper reviews the current literature regarding Muslim young people’s online social networking and participatory practices with the aim of examining whether these practices open up new spaces of civic engagement and political participation. The paper focuses on the experiences of young Muslims living in western societies, where, since September 11, the ability to assert claims as citizens i...

This paper elucidates the experience and thinking behind our new web-based environment for asynchronous group deliberation: Deme (pronounced "deem"). Deme grew out of participation in and observations of group decision making and community democracy, and is being developed within a university-community partnership to enhance civic participation and to bridge digital divides. Civic decisions in ...

The present paper investigated the role of social media in youth participatory politics. A survey of university students was conducted in March, 2013. The findings of the present study indicated that a large number of the respondents participated in political activities through social media. Facebook provided the respondents with common platform to discuss issues confronting Pakistani society. ...

One of SIAP's goals has been to explore the dimensions of cultural participation and, in particular, the social context of participation. In a 1994 working paper, Stern used the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA) specially commissioned in 1992 for the Philadelphia metropolitan area to which he added information on the number of cultural organizations located in the zip code of ea...

People use communication and information tools to meet existing needs and purposes. In Fischer's (1992) words, 'Americans used the telephone to enhance the ways of life to which they were already committed.' As such, media have 'dual effects' (Pool, 1982) depending on an individual's prior behavior, needs and interests. This paper brings evidence to bear on the question of the long-term effects...

Civic engagement is a classic example of a collective action problem: while civic participation improves life in the community as a whole, it is individually costly and thus there is an incentive to free ride on the actions of others. Yet, we observe significant inter-individual variation in the degree to which people are in fact civically engaged. Early accounts reconciling the theoretical pre...

This article considers participation experiences of 14 year-old and upper secondary students in six European countries that were involved in the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) Civic Education Study: the Czech Republic, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, Sweden and Switzerland, countries that vary in their history of institution of democratic regimes. Part...

Abstract Direct deliberative democracy presents a conceptually attractive model of civic governance – particularly relevant at local scale. We outline the ‘work’ of direct deliberative democracy by considering its underlying principles and objectives, and discuss four fundamental challenges that are commonly proposed: the difficulty of coordinating direct participation, the expertise required o...

We establish an inverse relationship between family ties, generalized trust and political participation. The more individuals rely on the family as a provider of services, insurance, transfer of resources, the lower is civic engagement and political participation. The latter, together with trust, are part of what is known as social capital, therefore in this paper we contribute to the investiga...