Youth & Civic Engagement Memo 1 African-American Youth and Civic Engagement: A Brief Review of the Literature

While Alexis de Tocqueville praised Americans for being a people that were “forever forming associations, ” the past two decades have been marked by increasing apprehension about the political and civic indifference of the American public.1 Civic engagement has become a salient issue to those both inside and outside of the academy.2 As declarations of civic decline have proliferated, a surge of scholarly work has begun to investigate the validity, meaning, and implications of diminished civic activism. Within this body of work, there is a growing emphasis on the importance of the civic participation of youth. Observations of generational disparities in patterns of civic engagement have raised questions about the viability of democracy in the face of widespread disaffection among youth (Putnam 1996; Soule 2001). In response, social scientists within the field of civic engagement have centered on youth as a subject of inquiry. Those who study the civic patterns of youth vary widely in terms of underlying research questions, approaches to answering those questions, methods employed, and stances in ongoing debates about even the most fundamental matters in the field. In this memo, I elaborate on and analyze the literature relevant to youth and civic engagement