African American Youth Political Participation
Abstract
This essay briefly explores what existing research in political science has to say about the political participation of African American youth. The first section traces mainstream work in political science on participation. The early work on participation, based on the large-n survey tradition of the Columbia and Michigan election studies, focuses almost exclusively on voting, taking account race or age only as controls. The second section deals with the emergence of the currently dominant model of participation, the “resource” or “civic participation” model, which takes into account different forms of political activity besides voting and turns attention to factors unique to African Americans. Explaining race-based differences in levels and types of political participation turns out to be the driving focus on current research. Following this, I explore electoral and nonelectoral forms of participation in detail, paying special attention to youth of color, drawing from the most recent studies of their participation.
Andrew Dilts
Andrew Dilts is a doctoral student in political science, studying the politics of punishment, paying special attention to what it means to be a felon in the United States.