How does participation in civil society—both formal organizations and informal social groups—shape democratic preferences, polarization, and political engagement?

The literature on civil society and backsliding largely focuses on groups that either mobilize in support of, or in opposition to, backsliding incumbents. I take a more nuanced approach, considering the range of relationships that civil society may have with these governments. I do so via disaggregating binary distinctions between “opposition” and “supporters” to consider the variety of civic life across different levels of formalization, size, missions, and funding.

Building on this insight, I examine how civic engagement in its diverse forms shape both individual- and group-level political decisions, including on important political behaviors like vote choice, voluntarism, and political endorsements. I provide a novel typology to help scholars study civil society across degrees of formalism and political missions, which I use to show that informal and apolitical civic organizations are most resilient to autocratic co-optation. My dissertation’s primary contribution is to explain how citizens’ self-perceptions of civil society’s pluralism conditions their response to democratic attacks.

To do so, I leverage variation in the success of backsliding incumbents, and their ties with civil society, across multiple post-communist democracies in Eastern Europe. These insights draw on extensive, original organizational- and individual- level survey experiments across four countries, five original datasets comprising the universe of civic organizations in Poland (>2.1 million observation), and more than 100 interviews collected over a cumulative 1.5 years of fieldwork in Poland and Hungary.

My dissertation was awarded the 2025 Kahin Prize in International Relations by the Cornell Department of Government, for the “most promising dissertation on foreign politics.'' It has also been generously supported by the Title VIII Research Fellowship, Hoover Institution, APSA Centennial Center, and, at Cornell, the Center on Global Democracy, Institute for European Studies, Center for Social Sciences, and Roper Center for Public Opinion Research.

I include a working chapter here, which is the fifth empirical chapter. I am happy to share others upon request.