Scholarly studies of political socialization began a dramatic decline during the mid-1970s. One source of this downward spiral lay in the dwindling novelty of studying pre-adults. Political scientists are accustomed to dealing with the “real world” of politics, one occupied and ruled by adults. After a prolonged lull, research began to increase in the 1990s and has continued onward. One driving force in this renewal stems from the decline in civic virtue among upcoming cohorts said to characterize most Western countries. A second influence was the crumbling of the former Soviet Union and the appearance of transitional and new democracies around the globe. In an effort to understand each of these developments and to propose possible solutions, a variety of institutions and scholars have returned to the question of citizenship development, often with the intention of improving the inculcation of civic virtue among the young.

Cultivating Democracy provides a most welcome addition to this new literature, much of which is being supplied by nonpolitical scientists working outside the American context. The book relies primarily on a 1999–2000 self-administered survey of 3,060 students, grades 9–12, distributed across 29 high schools in the greater Baltimore–Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. Additional materials come from informal interviews with a small number of students and from a follow-up survey in four schools in late 2001 designed to assess the impact of 9/11. Key dependent variables include political knowledge, discussion, efficacy, and attitudes about nationalism, diversity, and the justice system.

The study is innovative in three major ways. First, it goes beyond using individual student characteristics as determinants of political outcomes by employing features of the communities in which the schools are located. One set of contextual characteristics consists of several standard sociodemographic features of the zip code area, courtesy of the Census Bureau, in which the schools are located. Three political characteristics—turnout, party diversity, and partisan bias—were pieced together from precinct maps. In contending that context makes a difference, the authors follow a growing, positive trend in the discipline and extend it to the study of political socialization

The second significant departure, which flows directly from the first, is the employment of structural equation modeling and hierarchical linear modeling to take into account the spatial clustering represented by the size of student samples within schools. Consequently, the authors are able to state more precisely the interaction between individual and environmental effects and to assess how environmental factors affect relationships at the individual level. Although the statistical results are somewhat more difficult to interpret than the more customary ordinary-least-squares procedures, the technique should serve as a model for future investigations using nested designs.

A third departure from preceding work is the detailed attention devoted to race, ethnicity, and religion at both the individual and community levels. To the extent that political socialization studies have looked at racial and ethnic minorities, it has usually been with respect to one particular grouping. This project has sufficient numbers of whites, African Americans, Latinos, and Asians, as well as Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and (admittedly in small numbers) Muslims, and those with “Eastern” religions. Their inclusion takes recognition of the increasingly heterogeneous nature of American society and enriches the analysis considerably.

It follows that some of the major findings reflect these three innovations. Here in no particular order is a sampling. Religion tends to be less important as a socialization force than are race and ethnicity. Being in a political minority tends to depress levels of civic engagement, while being reared in communities of high political activity and diversity tends to elevate “good” outcomes. In general, living in coethnic communities leads to what the authors call less desirable socialization outcomes. While most attitudes and behaviors are context-dependent to some extent, a few—such as African American views of the justice system—are not. Information levels rise as a result of traumatic events such as 9/11. Political vitality at the community level can act to overcome the effects of student perceptions of school unfairness and a disliking of civics courses. The critical point to most of these and a host of other intriguing findings is that they are contingent on having observations at two levels.

It might seem ungracious to point out shortcomings in a work that helps restore a subfield, and I do so in the spirit of thinking about future research. The nonprobability sampling within schools leaves open the possibility of selection effects. While the employment of community contextual factors adds enormously to the value of this project, one wishes for more. The indicators of social capital, diversity, and political vitality are rather few and general. More importantly, the way they affect the students is largely a matter of inference. There is little information as to how the students perceive or interact with representations of these community features, aside from a few related to school affairs. Although schools constitute an intimate environment for adolescents, the contextual features of the schools and their student bodies are scarcely tapped. As for individual level characteristics, the failure to distinguish among major strands of Protestantism weakens the analysis according to religion, and the absence of participation in extracurricular affairs represents a glaring omission in view of its known influence. Finally, despite the presence of both individual- and community-level predictors, the explanatory values for most of the models presented are quite modest. On a more churlish note, I was disappointed that the editing process allowed general footnote references to books, rather than to the pertinent chapters, and also permitted endless repetition of certain phrases throughout the book.

These qualifications notwithstanding, Cultivating Democracy provides an excellent example of the riches found by taking into account both individual and contextual features in studying political socialization. I hope it inspires others to do the same.