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. By disaggregating civil society from the binary of “opposition” and “supporters” to consider the variety of civic life across different levels of formalization, size, and funding, my dissertation book project unpacks the conditionality of civil society’s support for backsliding incumbents and points to when this support may falter. I examine how individual-level attitudes and behaviors are socialized by civic engagement, and how this shapes both individual- and group-level political decisions, including on important political behaviors like vote choice, voluntarism, and political endorsements.

To do so, I leverage variation in the success of backsliding incumbents, and their ties with civil society, across the Czechia, Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary (the “Visegrad 4”). I deploy a mixture of interviews, focus groups, surveys, and experiments at both the individual- and organizational-level.

It has also been generously supported by the Title VIII Research Fellowship, Hoover Institution and, at Cornell, the Center on Global Democracy, Institute for European Studies, Center for Social Sciences, and Roper Center for Public Opinion Research.

I have several working papers and chapters from my dissertation, which I would be happy to share upon request.