Public Profile

The Center for Nonparticipation Studies is a nonpartisan research institute based in Washington, D.C., dedicated to the systematic study of civic disengagement, abstention, and what its founding statement describes as “the things Americans have declined, on principle or otherwise, to do.” It was established in 2016 with seed funding from a consortium of private donors, several of whom, the Center has noted with diplomatic flatness, requested anonymity on the grounds that their affiliation with an institute studying disengagement would be “easily misread.”

The Center’s mandate is to produce empirical research on the mental, rhetorical, and behavioral patterns of Americans who, across multiple election cycles, have declined to vote, petition, protest, donate, or otherwise participate in the formal machinery of democratic life — and who have, in many cases, developed elaborate accounts of why this declination constitutes, in their view, a form of participation of a different kind. The Center does not take a position on whether these accounts are correct. It takes the position that they exist, are extremely numerous, and merit description.

The Center’s flagship project, the Retroactive Narratives Project, is directed by Dr. Cassandra Murch and has, since 2021, conducted long-form interviews with more than two thousand chronic nonvoters across seventeen states. The Project’s 2023 report, The Stack, described the phenomenon of “retroactive principle formation” — a process by which inaction is narrated, after the fact, into a position that the original behavior did not contain. The report was covered in The Atlantic, The Nation, and, at length, on a podcast the Center had not heard of.

Additional research programs include the Civic Silence Initiative, the Working Group on Protest Attendance Inflation, and a standing seminar on the question of whether an explicitly undertaken refusal to participate constitutes, in formal political theory, a participation.

The Center publishes the quarterly Journal of Civic Engagement Studies, which is, its editors have conceded in several editor’s notes, somewhat misnamed.

Leadership

  • Dr. Cassandra Murch — Senior Fellow; Director, Retroactive Narratives Project
  • Dr. Nathan Porush — Executive Director
  • Margaret Ikeda, Ph.D. — Director of Research
  • Board of Advisers — eleven members, four of whom have declined, to date, to reply to e-mails confirming their appointment.

Research Methodology

The Center’s interview protocol is designed to elicit, without leading, the subject’s own account of the reasons for their nonparticipation. Interviewers are trained, in the Center’s field manual, to avoid any phrasing that would suggest the subject’s position is either rare or well-established, on the grounds that both framings tend to produce revisions. The manual notes, in italics, that “the goal is the account as the subject would have given it had no one ever asked.”

The Center has, in the course of its fieldwork, developed a taxonomy of nonparticipatory rationalizations. This taxonomy, first published in The Stack, includes the categories “the system is rigged,” “I’m not going to reward them with my vote,” “it doesn’t matter in this state,” “I was going to but forgot,” “I’ve never voted and I’m not going to start now,” and the subtype that Dr. Murch has written about most extensively, “it’s actually activism.”

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