Report says more civic engagement means less unemployment

Huffington Post: Peter Levine
Could Civic Engagement Be the Key to Economic Success? Comments allowed.

• My colleagues and I are concerned about civic engagement: voting, volunteering, belonging to and leading groups, attending meetings, and working with fellow citizens to address problems. Those activities are now measured annually by the federal Current Population Survey. So we included them in a statistical model along with major eight economic factors to see what explained changes in unemployment best.
• We found that the civic measures were strongly related to changes in employment from 2006-2010, but none of the economic factors was associated with employment to a statistically significant degree. Please see Civic Health and Unemployment: Can Engagement Strengthen the Economy, released [Sep 16th, 2011].
• In short, the more civic engagement, the less unemployment. Particularly valuable forms of engagement seemed to include volunteering, working with neighbors, group membership, meeting attendance, registering to vote, serving as a group officer, and contacting public officials.

Also worth noting: it has been shown that formerly incarcerated felons who vote in elections have a lower recivitism rate (they are less likely to return to prison.)