
Matthew Baggetta
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About Matthew
Baggetta's research focuses on civil society, civic engagement, and social movements with a particular focus on membership-based organizations. Overarching themes in Baggetta's writings include the importance of creating opportunities for members to actively participate in and lead organizations and the ways such opportunities can influence members and communities. Baggetta serves on the board of directors of the Melos Institute, a think tank focused on membership-based organizations, and contributes to Mobilizing Ideas, an interdisciplinary blog focused on social movements.
Contributions
How Civic Associations Can Create Committed Leaders
In the News
Publications
Distinguishes organizing (a transformative approach to collective action) from mobilizing (the aggregation of like-minded people) and discusses the importance of organizing for the vitality and stability of democracy.
Shows that joining recreational clubs can have small impacts on members' political participation by changing how they think about their relationship to broader communities.
Introduces an innovative new systematic social observation approach to collecting detailed, quantitative data about what goes on in large numbers of civil society organization meetings, events, and activities. Reveals that the demographic diversity of college student organizations varies in unexpected ways.
Shows what skills environmental association leaders learn, how much they develop those skills, and what associational settings foster that learning.