Millions of young people have risen up to fight the growing climate crisis through youth-led climate movements. Several factors are associated with youths’ engagement in climate protest, such as a desire to be with like-minded people and direct experience with the climate crisis. However, longitudinal research is needed to understand what sustains youth climate activism over the short-term. This dissertation uses three waves of original data collected from a sample of 193 young (18-24 years old) climate activists in India over 6 weeks in 2023. Multinomial logistic regression was used to examine the associations between seven factors (personal growth, sense of community, individual and collective agency, seeing tangible achievements, political repression, climate anxiety, and online and in-person harassment) and changes in youths’ level of climate activism (increased, stable, or decreased) cross-sectionally within each wave, and longitudinally across each pair of waves. The predictors were developed based on an inductive qualitative study (Wilf et al., under review). A Youth Research Advisory Board of 6 young Indian activists supported survey development and recruitment. Cross-sectional results showed that heightened personal growth, collective agency, and seeing tangible achievements from activism were associated with youths’ increased and stable compared with decreased activism, and that social media and in-person harassment were negatively associated with youth reporting stable compared with increased climate activism. Youth with heightened individual agency (power) were less likely to report increased or stable compared with decreased activism. Longitudinally, agency (competence) was positively associated with youths’ increased versus decreased activism, and negatively associated with youths’ stable versus increased activism. Across analyses, school and family responsibilities were significant deterrents to youths’ increased and stable activism, and religious minority youth were less likely to report stable compared with increased and decreased activism. In cross-sectional analysis, men were more likely to report increased and stable compared with decreased activism than women. Few of the results were consistent across waves, or in both cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis, and therefore should be interpreted with caution. This study provides insights into the factors that may shape short-term youth climate activism, with implications for scholars, climate movements, and youth-focused practitioners.

Safeguarding democracy in the United States requires ensuring that all citizens are able to vote and have that vote count. However, voter turnout rates by race and age are uneven. Employing a critical race theory approach to the analysis of election administrations for 3,111 counties and county equivalents, three research questions were examined in this study: 1) How do election administration practices cluster across counties; 2) What is the relationship between election administration profiles and overall youth (18 – 29) voter turnout? Does the relationship between election administration profiles and youth voter turnout vary by ethno-racial groups; and 3) To what extent do election administration practice profiles relate to voter turnout rates differently for youth compared to adult voters, within ethno-racial groups?Latent profile analysis was conducted using three-step maximum likelihood estimation. Results indicated three typologies of election administration: 1) Well Administered, characterized by low registration rejections, felony removal, failure to respond removals, and mail ballot rejections rates and low rates of provisional ballots cast); 2) Inadequately Administered, registration rejections and removal rates below the national average, but more than 10 times the rate of the Well Administered typology; and 3) Maladministered, characterized by high rejection rates and high variability across all indicators. A county’s carceral climate, rates of adult incarceration and juvenile institutionalizations, was a significant predictor typology membership. Youth voter turnout was higher in counties with well administered elections compared to the inadequately administered elections, but not maladministered ones. White youth in well administered counties had higher voter turnout than inadequately administered elections, but there were no associations between election administration typology and voter turnout for other ethno-racial groups. The turnout gap between youth and adult voters did not vary across election administration typology overall, yet for Latinx and Asian American Pacific Islanders, the youth-adult gap narrowed because of lower rates of adult voting in maladministered counties. Focusing on how election administration typologies vary across counties provides a pathway to protecting voting rights under state laws and constitutions that guarantee fair elections. For political social workers, understanding the typology of a county’s election aids in tailoring voter engagement strategies.

Organizers, scholars, and advocates have long questioned how to increase public support for anti-carceral policies and change the dominant attitudes that uphold support for structural racism. This study examined a deep canvass community organizing tactic that aimed to increase support for a jail decarceration policy proposal in Los Angeles County.

Through a randomized, placebo-controlled field experiment, a community organization had over 1,400 deep canvass conversations with registered voters in majority-white neighborhoods who had previously completed a public opinion survey panel. Two deep canvass conversation models were compared: one that explicitly discussed anti-Black racism in the criminal legal system and another that took a race-absent approach. Outcomes were assessed through participant completion of additional surveys one week and two months after the intervention.

This project addressed several questions related to the intervention’s causal effects: To what extent does deep canvassing increase support for anti-carceral policies and change dominant carceral and racialized attitudes? How do the effects of a race-absent approach compare to those of a race-explicit approach? Are effects durable up to two months after the intervention and after exposure to a counter-message?

Deep canvassing was effective in achieving the community group’s core organizing aims: increasing support for jail decarceration policies and changing dominant carceral attitudes. Both the race-absent and race-explicit approaches were comparable in their effectiveness, meaning that discussing racism did not decrease support for equity policies. Both conditions had limited effects that were durable two months after the intervention and after exposure to a counter-message. Some distinctions did emerge between the race-absent and race-explicit conditions at the level of changing dominant carceral attitudes or issue-specific attitudes––suggesting that there may be some specific ways in which discussing racism or not activates unique considerations that differentially influence attitudes. These distinctions became particularly pronounced over time and after exposure to a counter-message. Considerations for future research and implications for community organizing, abolition praxis, and social welfare are also discussed.