Research on civic engagement shows that volunteering rates decline as young people move from adolescence into emerging adulthood. Using panel data spanning this period of the life course, we examine the impact of secondary schooling type—public, Catholic, Protestant, private nonreligious, and homeschool—on sustaining volunteering into emerging adulthood. We apply a framework that posits pathways between secondary schooling and sets of opportunities to volunteer embedded in institutions and social networks. We also posit a link between schooling type and durable motivational dispositions to volunteer. Results indicate substantial differences by schooling type, although our measures of opportunity structure and motivation do not adequately account for these differences. Those educated in Protestant secondary schools are considerably more likely than other young people to continue to volunteer, even accounting for potential spurious influences. Those schooled at home or in private nonreligious settings are significantly less likely to continue volunteering. We conclude by discussing two alternative accounts that should be addressed in further research: one focused on the role of habituated social practices and the other focused on differences in organizational efforts to link adolescent volunteering to emerging adult volunteering.
The American exceptionalism thesis holds that American political culture produces an unusually litigious society. The US Christian right has participated in litigation, especially in constitutional rights cases dealing with issues such as religious schools and abortion. However, since 1982 Canada has had a constitutional Charter of Rights and an increasingly active Christian right of its own. We compare data on Christian right involvement in education, abortion, and "right to die" (euthanasia, assisted suicide or mercy killing) cases at the Supreme Court level in both countries. Among North America's Christian conservatives, exceptionalism has eroded, but not disappeared. We employ interviews and data on religious interest groups to analyze the sources of legal mobilization, and find that it is a matter not just of political culture, but also resource mobilization, political opportunity structures, and religious worldviews.
The proliferation of school choice policies has expanded schooling options for parents. While this trend coincides with a decline in private school enrollment, it is unclear how these policies affect enrollment among various religious traditions and religiosity. We study the impact of religion and school choice initiatives on the decision to enroll in different types of private schools in this new era. We evaluate two concurrent theories on the role of religion in the enrollment trends of private schools. Religious school enrollment may be motivated by (1) the desire to transmit a religious social identity, or (2) the secular goods associated with religious-based education. Using state-level data, we test these two explanations by estimating fixed effects regression models predicting private school market shares between 1993–2011 among different religious groups. We find support for both theories, particularly for a robust private school market aided by school choice policies.
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