Toff: How Americans are engaged with news, politics, religion and civic life
While on sabbatical from the MJC, Toff is collaborating with the Pew Research Center in Washington.
A woman packs up boxes of vegetables for a food shelf in Minnesota in 2023. The Pew study identifies 9% of the U.S. adult population as Mobilizers, who "volunteer, attend local government meetings, donate to political causes, follow the news closely and attend religious services at high rates." Photo courtesy of UMN CLA
MJC director Ben Toff's latest research explores Americans’ engagement with news, politics and civic life.
Toff is on sabbatical from the Minnesota Journalism Center in 2026, and working alongside fellow researchers at the Pew Research Center.
In their latest report, the team has identified four distinct groups that Americans fall into that reflect their participation in civic life: Mobilizers, connectors, spectators and outsiders.
From the report:
Concerns about whether Americans are retreating from various forms of engagement with society are not new. Declines in religious attendance, civic group memberships and attention to news have been well documented. And questions about how Americans participate have taken on new dimensions after the COVID-19 pandemic forced the cancellation of countless social activities.
Yet broad claims about whether Americans are “engaged” or “disengaged” – and how this is changing over time – are difficult to assess. Participation in public life takes many forms, from attending a school board meeting in person to sharing a news article online, and it is not easily captured by any single measure. The way people engage also is evolving along with technological changes.
To better capture the full range of how Americans participate, this study looked at several ways Americans engage (or don’t) with the world around them, using a large, one-time national survey.
Dive in to the full set of findings on Pew's website.