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How Americans Are Engaged With News, Politics, Religion and Civic Life

 

 

July 20, 2026 - How many Americans show up in public life – and in what ways?

These questions have been on people’s minds since even before a global pandemic disrupted social activities for years and technologies like smartphones, social media and artificial intelligence began to change the way humans interact.

Americans’ varying levels of engagement in society
% of U.S. adults who are categorized into each engagement group
Note: Engagement groups are based on a cluster analysis that sorted Americans into four groups based on their responses to 19 questions about political activity, civic involvement, religious attendance and attention to news. Respondents who were not categorized into an engagement group are not shown.
Source: Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults conducted July 9-Dec. 5, 2025.
“How Americans Are Engaged With News, Politics, Religion and Civic Life”
PEW-KNIGHT INITIATIVE

Americans’ engagement with others is not one-dimensional, according to a new Pew Research Center study from the Pew-Knight Initiative. We looked across a range of behaviors: political activity, civic involvement, religious attendance and attention to news. What we found was that rather than falling along a single spectrum, U.S. adults sort into four distinct groups that reflect different patterns of participation:

  • Mobilizers (9% of U.S. adults) are the most active across all the different 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 do things like volunteer for campaigns and contact elected officials.
  • Connectors (28%) are involved in many ways, centering on community life, charitable giving and religious attendance. They vote, participate in groups, attend religious services and donate to nonpolitical causes at high rates, similar to Mobilizers. But they are much less likely to take political action.
  • 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.
How 4 groups vary by key measures of social and civic engagement
% of U.S. adults in each engagement group who say they …
Note: Engagement groups are based on a cluster analysis that sorted Americans into four groups based on their responses to 19 questions about political activity, civic involvement, religious attendance and attention to news.
Source: Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults conducted July 9-Dec. 5, 2025. “How Americans Are Engaged With News, Politics, Religion and Civic Life”
PEW-KNIGHT INITIATIVE

Refer to the appendix for the full list of 19 questions that were used to create these groups, as well as how each group answered all of the questions. Read “How we measured Americans’ engagement in public life” for a detailed look at how we conducted this study.

Although political polarization has been a defining fact of American life in the 21st century, none of the four groups is dominated by one political party.

Engagement groups are politically mixed
% of U.S. adults in each engagement group who are …
Outsiders Spectators Connectors Mobilizers
 
Note: Engagement groups are based on a cluster analysis that sorted Americans into four groups based on their responses to 19 questions about political activity, civic involvement, religious attendance and attention to news.
Source: Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults conducted July 9-Dec. 5, 2025. “How Americans Are Engaged With News, Politics, Religion and Civic Life”
PEW-KNIGHT INITIATIVE

The two most highly engaged groups lean modestly in different directions politically: Mobilizers are slightly more likely to be Democrats (or lean Democratic) and Connectors are a bit more likely to be Republicans or GOP leaners. But it is clear that members of both parties engage – or don’t – in a variety of ways.

Why study this now?

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. The survey was conducted in late 2025 and was designed to capture the opinions of Americans who engage at different levels, offering respondents the chance to complete the survey on paper, by phone, or online, and making multiple efforts to contact people who didn’t initially respond.

Below, we take a closer look at each of the four groups.

You can also explore more in depth:

 Mobilizers

Where the Mobilizers stand out from other engagement groups
% of Mobilizers who say they …