Formal education is crucial for creating enlightened and active citizens. The better educated are more engaged, more knowledgeable, and more politically tolerant. Despite a dramatic increase in education attainment over the last quarter century, political engagement has not risen at a commensurate level. How and why education affects citizenship in these ways has until now been a puzzle.
Norman H. Nie, Jane Junn, and Kenneth Stehlik-Barry provide answers by uncovering the causal relationship between education and democratic citizenship. They argue that citizenship encompasses both...

This important book takes a fresh look at what America's high school seniors know about government and politics and how they learn it. "In this timely and persuasive book, Niemi and Junn provide the best evidence to date that civic education does make a difference in political learning and that certain curricular aspects facilitate that learning. First rate." -- M. Kent Jennings, UCSB

Foreign migration to the United States is dramatically altering the demographic profile of the American electorate. Nearly a third of all Americans are of non-white and non-European descent. Latinos and Hispanics have recently eclipsed African Americans as the largest minority group in the United States. Between 1990 and 2000, Asians doubled the size of their population to more than 4 percent of Americans. Though immigration has altered the racial and ethnic composition of every state in the nation, surprisingly little is known about the consequences of this new heterogeneity for American...

The United States is once again experiencing a major influx of immigrants. Questions about who should be admitted and what benefits should be afforded to new members of the polity are among the most divisive and controversial contemporary political issues.
Using an impressive array of evidence from national surveys, The Politics of Belonging illuminates patterns of public opinion on immigration and explains why Americans hold the attitudes they do. Rather than simply characterizing Americans as either nativist or nonnativist, this book argues that controversies over immigration...