Previous research suggests that women’s descriptive representation may have a role-model effect on young women, encouraging them to greater levels of political participation. Using data from the Monitoring the Future Survey and the National Survey of Political and Civic Engagement of Young People, we examine whether highly visible female role models like Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and Sarah Palin, and viable female candidates for governor and senator had a role-model effect on young women. At the national level, we find some evidence of a role-model effect resulting from the election of Speaker Pelosi and the presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton, but the effects are largely concentrated among young women who are Democratic and liberal. We find little evidence that Sarah Palin’s vice-presidential run had a role-model effect on young women, regardless of party or ideology. Our state-level analysis of viable female gubernatorial and senatorial candidates finds that role-model effects on young women and men are mediated in different ways by ideology and, to a lesser extent, party.
States’ varied decisions with respect to Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act have drawn significant attention to questions about equity across states. Missing from the conversation is consideration of the varied impact that reform will have within states. This article considers how low-income Pennsylvanians will fare under Medicaid expansion. Although Medicaid reform has already expanded access to insurance to significant numbers of low-income residents in the state, improvements in access to health care are mediated by pre-existing regional inequalities in social determinants of health and by Pennsylvania’s system of health governance. Drawing on lessons gleaned from the literature on regionalism, and examples of success in states that have adopted regional approaches to health delivery, we offer a theoretical approach for thinking regionally in Pennsylvania by building opportunities and capacities for cross-jurisdictional approaches to health and health care access.
In 1945, a vast range of US civic organizations and other groups were mobilized into a state-sanctioned campaign on behalf of a new international governance structure: the United Nations. This was a novel collaboration, one that demonstrated the State Department’s acknowledgment of the value of civic activity and organized interests to securing foreign policy goals and that positioned US groups to assert an independent role in shaping the formal institutions of the United Nations. While scholars of American political development (APD) have tentatively embraced the notion that international institutions matter to American politics, past research on mid-twentieth century interests, conventionally focused on domestic business and trade associations, has underappreciated how and why the United Nations marked an important movement for interest development. Of particular significance, US voluntary and civic organizations were instrumental in securing a role for nongovernmental organizations in the UN Economic and Security Council, thereby further linking American and international politics and reshaping state-society relationships. In brief, this article argues that the State Department’s campaign to mobilize public support around the United Nations, as well as the creation of the United Nations, generated new incentives for the maintenance and mobilization of existing groups and subsidized the formation of new groups.
We discuss teaching strategies designed to enhance students’ informational competency. Informational competency shares some of the broad goals of information literacy (IL), including for example, helping students develop the ability to identify, find, evaluate, and produce information. Our concept of informational competency differs in foreground the skills of democratic citizenship outside of the classroom and beyond research activities in the field. Students—citizens—who are informationally competent, not only possess information literacy, but they are also thoughtful curators of political news, intentional and reflective media consumers, and ethical and effective users of social media when it comes to receiving and sharing political information. We discuss strategies to guide students in undergraduate American government courses in cultivating habits of media consumption, developing the skills to evaluate political information and news, and maintaining a healthy skepticism alongside feelings of political trust in a shifting political media landscape.
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