A major new Pew Research Center study released Wednesday found that American civic engagement does not fall along a single spectrum but instead clusters into four distinct groups, with the two least active categories accounting for roughly three in five U.S. adults.
The findings, part of the Pew-Knight Initiative, offer a national portrait of how people participate in community, religious, news, and civic life.
A survey built to reach the disengaged
People participate in public life in different ways, from voting and volunteering to following the news and attending religious or community activities, but these behaviors have often been studied separately. The new study was designed to change that.
SSRS conducted the Cross-Sectional Engagement Survey for Pew Research Center using address-based sampling and a multimode protocol. The survey was fielded from July 9 to Dec. 5, 2025. Participants were first mailed an invitation to complete an online survey, and a paper survey was later mailed to those who did not respond.
In total, 2,705 respondents completed the survey online, 2,500 completed the paper survey, and 188 completed the survey over the phone, for a total of 5,393. People could respond online, on paper, or by telephone, and researchers reached out multiple times to those who did not initially respond.
How the four groups were identified
To classify Americans into engagement groups, researchers performed a cluster analysis of the Cross-Sectional Engagement Survey based on 19 measures of participation across the range of activities covered.
They used Gower’s distance, a statistical method that computes how similar or different people are based on their answers.
The result was four named groups. Mobilizers, at 9% of U.S. adults, are the most active across all areas. They volunteer, attend local government meetings, donate to political causes, follow the news closely, and attend religious services at high rates. What sets them apart most clearly is their political action: They are by far the most likely to volunteer for campaigns and contact elected officials. Connectors (28%) are involved in many ways, centering on community life, charitable giving, and religious attendance.
Spectators (31%) are much less likely than Mobilizers and Connectors to participate in civic or political activities, but they follow the news at similarly high rates. When they engage with news online, Spectators tend to do so by privately chatting about it or liking posts rather than publicly commenting or posting.
Outsiders (31%) participate at relatively low levels across the activities measured in this study, including following the news. Still, they are not universally disengaged: 41% say they voted in 2024, and 24% attend religious services at least monthly.
Age shapes the type of engagement, not just the level
Older adults are more likely to participate in long-standing civic activities like voting, donating money, or attending religious services. Younger adults, meanwhile, are more likely to engage online, including by liking or privately sharing news content. Younger Americans are more likely to be Spectators, those who follow the news and interact with it online but are less engaged in other aspects of public life. Nearly half of adults under 30 are Spectators (46%), compared with 19% of adults 65 and older.
Researchers also paired the cross-sectional survey with data from Wave 179 of the American Trends Panel (ATP), a nationally representative panel of randomly selected U.S. adults, conducted Sept. 8, 14, 2025, among 5,195 respondents via web and phone. To connect the two surveys for further analysis, researchers assigned ATP respondents to the derived engagement groups based on how similar their behavior patterns were to those of the most typical respondents in each engagement group from the cross-sectional survey, again using Gower’s distance. This approach lets researchers analyze attitudes and knowledge using ATP data while keeping the engagement groups rooted in the cross-sectional survey.
What the findings mean going forward
Americans who participate more in public life are more interested in politics, and more likely to have positive feelings about the state of their local communities, the study found.
The least active group, Outsiders, are less likely than other groups to say they have negative feelings about the state of the country. Outsiders are also less likely to trust news organizations. But trust in the federal government is similarly low across all four groups, and engagement makes little difference. That nuance complicates simple narratives linking disengagement to dissatisfaction.
Older adults in each engagement group are the most likely to answer civic knowledge questions correctly, with similar patterns by age apparent across the four groups. Researchers note that many survey questions covered behavior in the prior 12 months, which for most respondents included the 2024 presidential election. Responses reflect the activities Americans took part in during this specific period, and patterns around political activity in particular may look somewhat different at other points in the political cycle.
