Do the voluntary activities of youth increase political engagement in adulthood? Political participation is typically characterized by inertia: reproduced within families, highly correlated with social class, and largely stable after the onset of adulthood. This research illustrates an element of political socialization that occurs just before the transition into full citizenship, that mimics adult civic life, and that can be available regardless of family advantage. The authors use two longitudinal national datasets to identify the kinds of voluntary associations that encourage members to be more politically active later in life. They find that general involvement in extracurricular activities is important, but that in particular, involvement in youth voluntary associations concerning community service, representation, speaking in public forums, and generating a communal identity most encourage future political participation. The authors find these effects net of self-selection and causal factors traditionally characterized in political socialization research. The influence of youth voluntary associations on future political activity is nontrivial and has implications for both democratic education and election outcomes.

Adolescent societies—whether arising from weak, short-term classroom friendships or from close, long-term friendships—exhibit various levels of network clustering, segregation, and hierarchy. Some are rank-ordered caste systems and others are flat, cliquish worlds. Explaining the source of such structural variation remains a challenge, however, because global network features are generally treated as the agglomeration of micro-level tie-formation mechanisms, namely balance, homophily, and dominance. How do the same micro-mechanisms generate significant variation in global network structures? To answer this question we propose and test a network ecological theory that specifies the ways features of organizational environments moderate the expression of tie-formation processes, thereby generating variability in global network structures across settings. We develop this argument using longitudinal friendship data on schools (Add Health study) and classrooms (Classroom Engagement study), and by extending exponential random graph models to the study of multiple societies over time.

We present data from a nationally representative 2017 survey of American adults. For heterosexual couples in the United States, meeting online has become the most popular way couples meet, eclipsing meeting through friends for the first time around 2013. Moreover, among the couples who meet online, the proportion who have met through the mediation of third persons has declined over time. We find that Internet meeting is displacing the roles that family and friends once played in bringing couples together.

This article explores how the efficiency of Internet search is changing the way Americans find romantic partners. We use a new data source, the How Couples Meet and Stay Together survey. Results show that for 60 years, family and grade school have been steadily declining in their influence over the dating market. In the past 15 years, the rise of the Internet has partly displaced not only family and school, but also neighborhood, friends, and the workplace as venues for meeting partners. The Internet increasingly allows Americans to meet and form relationships with perfect strangers, that is, people with whom they had no previous social tie. Individuals who face a thin market for potential partners, such as gays, lesbians, and middle-aged heterosexuals, are especially likely to meet partners online. One result of the increasing importance of the Internet in meeting partners is that adults with Internet access at home are substantially more likely to have partners, even after controlling for other factors. Partnership rate has increased during the Internet era (consistent with Internet efficiency of search) for same-sex couples, but the heterosexual partnership rate has been flat.

Increases in the rates of interracial and interreligious couples within the U.S. have occurred seemingly in tandem with the rise of the Internet and online dating, but the evidence connecting online sources of romance and couple heterogeneity have been limited and mixed. Using a unique dataset collected in 2009 and again in 2017 on how U.S. couples met, and controlling for the diversity of their local geographies, I find that couples who met online are more likely to be interracial, interreligious, and of different college degree status, but also more similar in age. These differences can vary by where on the Internet couples met, with online dating websites and apps showing a clear effect on increased age assortativity, while other online sources of partners do not. Populationlevel estimates suggests that only a small part of the recent changes in couple diversity can be directly attributed to couples meeting online, but there is the potential for more Internet-induced change if it becomes the primary source of romantic introductions.