{"id":4375,"date":"2013-09-18T07:05:27","date_gmt":"2013-09-18T12:05:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/citings\/?p=4375"},"modified":"2015-10-13T13:43:07","modified_gmt":"2015-10-13T18:43:07","slug":"stability-and-civic-involvement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/2013\/09\/18\/stability-and-civic-involvement\/","title":{"rendered":"Strong and Stable: Personal and Civic Lives"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Does<\/a>
Does loneliness leave us less civically inclined? Photo by Jacques Nyemb via flickr.com.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Election year or not, questions about voting behavior are rarely lacking among political pundits. Face it, they need stuff to talk about. Who will turn out in next year\u2019s mid-term elections? How will the \u201cObama coalition\u201d break in 2016? Social scientists are also posing questions. For example, why don\u2019t people vote after the death of a spouse?<\/p>\n

A study of 5.86 million Californians before and after the 2009-2010 statewide elections showed that \u201c11 percent of people who would have voted if their spouse were alive failed to make it to the polls even a year and a half after the death.\u201d The research found that immediately after the death of a spouse, people were less likely to vote, and while widows and widowers slowly return to the polls over time, they did not vote as often as they did before.<\/p>\n

One possible explanation draws upon a central theme of sociology—the interplay of personal and public life. This study suggests that a personal tragedy leads to a withdrawal from public life. As Emma Green writes in The Atlantic<\/a><\/i>, \u201cIf that\u2019s at least somewhat true, that public life seems less important when private life collapses, then it\u2019s also worth looking at the inverse: Do strong relationships and stable private lives make people better citizens?\u201d<\/p>\n

The important insights on social life that may come out of extensions of this research into wider elections, different geographic areas, socioeconomic effects, and longer-term studies, may well give the pundits and commentators something to talk about until 2016.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Election year or not, questions about voting behavior are rarely lacking among political pundits. Face it, they need stuff to talk about. Who will turn out in next year\u2019s mid-term elections? How will the \u201cObama coalition\u201d break in 2016? Social scientists are also posing questions. For example, why don\u2019t people vote after the death of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1896,"featured_media":4377,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[85],"tags":[23874,239,39115,109],"class_list":["post-4375","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-civic-life","tag-elections","tag-politics","tag-voting"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/files\/2013\/09\/Sore-Ankles-via-flickr.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4375","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1896"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4375"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4375\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4379,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4375\/revisions\/4379"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}