Democratic Organizing and Political Change: Toward a Research Agenda

Abstract

Abstract Democracy depends on people having the capacity to act collectively and navigate difference, yet political science often overlooks the transformative work that enables this. This essay foregrounds democratic organizing: sustained, relational, and strategic work that transforms people – reshaping their identities, relationships, and sense of what is possible – while building the collective capacity needed to act together across difference and inequality. Distinct from mobilizing, it does so through sustained relational investment rather than episodic activation. Drawing on U.S. and global examples, we present a conceptual framework built around three analytically distinct principles: interdependence as the proper ontological unit of analysis, power with as the mode of collective capacity-building organizing produces, and the politics of possibility as an orientation toward democratic futurity that keeps people engaged when outcomes are uncertain. We situate these principles within existing scholarship on collective action and civic engagement, extending that literature to address what it has systematically overlooked. We then outline a concrete research agenda for studying organizing as a central engine of democratic development.