When Does Involvement Strengthen Democracy — and When Does It Not?
Whether someone organizes through a trade union, volunteers in a local sports club, campaigns on social media, or participates in a movement like may have fundamentally different consequences for their democratic attitudes. Collective, institutionalized forms of participation tend to correlate with higher institutional trust and pluralistic attitudes. Individualized and primarily digital forms of involvement show mixed effects: they may foster a sense of self-efficacy, but they can also reinforce resentment, exclusion, and authoritarian views.
That civic involvement can cut both ways is not a new observation. In their study Bowling for Fascism, Satyanath, Voigtländer, and Voth show that dense networks of associations — such as choirs or sports clubs — accelerated the spread of NSDAP membership in Weimar Germany. Vibrant civic life is therefore not automatically a bulwark against authoritarianism; under certain conditions, it can become its vehicle. Under which conditions each dynamic prevails today remains empirically under-examined.
TACIT addresses this question systematically by comparing Germany and the United States — two democracies facing similar challenges despite markedly different institutional conditions: rising polarization, eroding institutional trust, and the resurgence of anti-democratic movements. Because these movements often mobilize through civil-society structures, the question of how civic involvement shapes democratic outcomes has become increasingly urgent.
A New Data Architecture for Comparative Democracy Research
At the core of the project is the integration of three data sources that have so far largely been studied in isolation:
This combination enables the analysis of both short-term reactions to political events and longer-term shifts in democratic attitudes.
“The decisive question is not whether, but when civic involvement strengthens democracy. The same associational structure, the same online mobilization can build institutional trust or erode it, depending on the political contexts and lines of conflict in which it is embedded. As long as we do not understand these conditions, a central mechanism of democratic resilience remains a black box”
Dr. Jonas Fegert, Head of the House of Participation at FZI
“One of the great challenges in understanding when civic engagement strengthens democracy is being able to cut through the complex chains of feedback between citizens’ experiences with their government and what they do in their community. Combining the remarkable SOSEC panel with long-run digital trace data gives us the opportunity to learn from those rare random events that unexpectedly impact civic engagement, thereby giving us a unique window into its impact.”
Professor Jacob N. Shapiro, John Foster Dulles Professor in International Affairs, Princeton University
A Partnership That Has Grown Over Several Years
TACIT is a shared initiative of Dr. Jonas Fegert (FZI & Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)) and Professor Jacob N. Shapiro (Princeton University). Since 2024, FZI has made selected SOSEC data exclusively available to Princeton University Survey Research Center, and both teams maintain a regular exchange on methodological questions.
Professor Shapiro, the John Foster Dulles Professor in International Affairs at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs, directs the Accelerator Initiative — an international research infrastructure for data-driven work on the information environment of democratic societies. The data infrastructure developed within TACIT will be integrated in the longer term, ensuring international visibility and continued use of the research resources developed in Baden-Württemberg beyond the project’s formal end date.
Societal Transfer and Policy Engagement
From the outset, TACIT is designed to make its research accessible to a broader public. Plans include data-journalistic analyses, policy-relevant recommendations, and public events that translate the project’s findings into formats suitable for different audiences — from civil society and media to political decision-makers.
Information about Jacob N. Shapiro https://politics.princeton.edu/people/jacob-n-shapiro