The Good Citizen: How a Younger Generation Is Reshaping American Politics. This item is unavailable.The Good Citizen: How a Younger Generation Is Reshaping American Politics

"The Good Citizen is the perfect introduction to my class. It focuses on younger people, which gives it a direct relevance to my students. The basic argument of the book is very compelling, and was an important qualifier on the normal ‘youth bashing’ that can often happen with regard to millennials and politics. I highly recommend this book. It will not disappoint."

―Michael Franz, Bowdoin College

The Good Citizen uses a new 2014 national public opinion survey to describe how Americans’ views of what it means to be a good citizen is changing. Contrary to conventional wisdom, younger generations are more politically engaged, are more politically tolerant, are supportive of a more active government, have stronger democratic ideals, and are more supportive of social justice. The young are creating new norms of citizenship that are leading to a renaissance of democratic participation. The new edition of this groundbreaking work will reshape the way we think about the American public, American youth, and the prospects for contemporary democracy. It uses evidence from the 2004 and 2014 General Social Surveys to describe Americans’ changing citizenship norms, the emergence of the Millennial Generation, how the Internet is changing participation patterns, and a new statistical primer to help students understand the survey findings.

Russell Dalton is a professor at the University of California, Irvine and former director of the Center for the Study of Democracy. His research and teaching focuses on the changing nature of citizen politics in contemporary democracies. He has received a Fulbright Research Fellowship, a German Marshall Fund Fellowship, Barbra Streisand Center Fellowship and POSCO Research Fellowship. He has served on the boards of the American National Election Study, the British Election Study and the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems. Among his recent authored or edited books are The Apartisan American (2012), Political Parties and Democratic Linkage (2011), Citizens, Context and Choice (2011), The Good Citizen (2009), Oxford Handbook of Political Behavior (2007), Citizens, Democracy and Markets around the Pacific Rim (2006), Democratic Challenges, Democratic Choices: The Erosion of Political Support in Advanced Industrial Democracies (2004), Democracy Transformed? The Expansion of Citizen Access in Advanced Industrial Democracies (2003), and Parties without Partisans: Political Change in Advanced Industrial Democracies (co-editor, 2001). He has also appeared in six feature-length Hollywood movies.