The major theme of the network is the relationships between social and political forms of "civic engagement" and "citizenship" in contemporary democracies. Involvement in clubs, associations, societies, and social organisations of all kinds is understood as one mechanism of social integration which interacts and competes with other mechanisms of integration such as family, place of work, neighbourhood, and friends. The debates about communitarianism, social capital, civil society, trust, and the crises of the welfare state provide the general intellectual background of this network. Empirically, its main object is an examination and evaluation of these predominantly normative approaches by integrating the results from national studies (representative surveys as well as community studies) into a common comparative framework. These empirical findings provide the basis for answering the central question for the network:
Under which social, societal, and organisational conditions contributes social involvement of citizens to qualitative ("better" democrats) and quantitative (more active democrats) improvements of contemporary democracies?