Institutionalizing Internships: Enhanced Civic Culture via State Capital Internship Programs

Abstract

Decades of scholarship on teaching and learning affirm the benefits of public service internships on student learning outcomes. Studies emphasize how hands-on fieldwork can increase students’ substantive knowledge, political efficacy, trust in government, and civic participation, among other factors. However, most articles treat internships equally without accounting for the variation in the institutionalization of experiential-learning programs within and across universities. We theorize that more structured internship programs (e.g., more student credits, intentionally designed curricula, additional faculty guidance) yield larger impacts on learning objectives centered on civic culture and education. We test this theory by analyzing three years of student data from two public universities’ fieldwork programs. We compare pretest and posttest survey results from undergraduates (1) participating in structured public service internship programs run in a state capital, (2) participating in internships pursued independently, and (3) majoring in a social science degree but having yet to complete an internship. We find that students pursuing a solo internship or via a structured program begin and end with higher political knowledge, efficacy, civic engagement, and related attitudes than the control group. We also find the more systematized an internship experience, the bigger the effect on key student learning outcomes. These results underscore how political science departments can fortify civic culture through more structured public service internship programs.

Keywords:

• Public service internships
• internship programs
• experiential learning
• civic culture

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Correction

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to John Clark, Kevin Lorentz II, Kimberly Saks McManaway, and other participants of the Michigan Political Science Association Conference in Big Rapids, Michigan on October 21, 2022, for their invaluable feedback on preliminary results. We also appreciate the anonymous reviewers’ and editors’ helpful comments. We claim any remaining errors or oversights.

Disclosure statement

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Correction Statement

This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15512169.2023.2295775)

Notes

1 We use the terms internship, practicum, fieldwork, and praxis interchangeably throughout the article.

2 Some WMU students do local government or law-related internships in the small city of the university’s main campus instead of the state capital.

3 Solo internship students take the same professional development coursework as State Capital Internship Program students but not the substantive state government and applied policy-writing coursework.

4 For the latter two questions, answers were marked correct if they provided estimates within an acceptable margin of error.

5 The response rate ranged from 76% to near 99% as students received course credit for completing the survey, but inclusion of their data in the research study was optional. The Institutional Review Board approval for WMU is 19-12-21 and MSU is STUDY00003836.

6 Supplementary Appendix Tables A2 and A3 display the panel data regression coefficients across these six learning objectives for interns in comparison with non-interns and solo interns relative to internship program students, respectively. The ATE models comparing the effect of any internship (program or solo) to the control of no internship do not include the practicum-type variable because control students did not engage in a praxis.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lauren S. Foley

Dr. Lauren S. Foley is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and director of the Capital Internship Program at Western Michigan University. She is the author of On the Basis of Race: How Higher Education Navigates Affirmative Action Policies, (NYU Press, 2023). Her work has also appeared in Studies in Law, Politics, and Society and the Journal of Law and Education.

Marty P. Jordan

Dr. Marty P. Jordan is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Michigan State University. He also coordinates MSU’s Michigan Government Semester Program, an intensive internship program at the state capital to encourage students to pursue careers in public service. His research broadly focuses on understanding policy processes and public administration within and across the U.S. states and localities. His work has appeared in State Politics & Policy Quarterly and Poverty & Public Policy, among other outlets.