Scaling Networks and New Paradigms for Civic Life

The Exchange: A Conversation with Political Scientist Hahrie Han

Mar 25, 2026

Murmuration’s Chief Research Officer, Sarah Stamper, sat down with political scientist Hahrie Han for The Exchange, our interview series featuring influential thought leaders, organizers, advocates, and others who are shaping the future of civic life.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Sarah Stamper: Thank you so much for making the time to talk with us about everything that’s been going on in your research, your lab, and winning the MacArthur Fellowship.

I want to start by talking about your newest book, “Undivided,” which centers on Crossroads, a large evangelical church in Cincinnati, as a primary case study. In the book, you followed a predominantly white evangelical megachurch in Cincinnati as it launched a program called Undivided to confront structural racism within its congregation and the broader community.

The book centers on the journeys of several church members as they confront difficult conversations about race and shift their perspectives over time. In Crossroads’ transformation, how much of the momentum came from explicitly theological commitments, and how much from relational organizing strategies that might translate beyond a faith-based setting?

Hahrie Han: I think a lot of people assume the program had the effects it did because the participants all believed in God, which is a faith commitment that animates people to action in a unique way. But, I think what actually mattered was that it was a group of people who had a visceral experience of the value of collective life. They had been part of this really vibrant church community ahead of confronting the issues they grappled with in the program. These are people who knew in their bones already that what we can do when we act together with others is more powerful than what we can do when we act alone. I always tell my students, once you’ve learned that lesson, once you have an experience like that in your life, you can never un-have it.

Sarah Stamper: Murmuration’s data shows that as third spaces vanish, belonging, community, and civic participation decline. In that context, and the context of faith communities, how should we think about the scalability and durability of relational organizing?

Hahrie Han: I 100% agree with the findings that you’re describing. With the loss of intermediary organizations, we’ve lost many of the natural social networks that knit our social fabric together. That was one of the things that the church, Crossroads, in my book offered: a culture of relational interaction.

They had lots of different sayings in the church, but one of the more common sayings was “we do life together.” It means that if you’re a part of this church, it’s not just that you show up for an hour on Sunday. No. Instead, it’s “we do life together,” which means that we want you to come and use our lobby as a co-working space, and there’s always free coffee, and there’s always babysitting that’s available so that parents can come and participate in events. They really want to provide a wraparound community to the people who are part of their church.

It’s a great question about the scalability of those kinds of social networks. And in fact, that was part of what made me really interested in studying these megachurches. If you’re getting 50,000 people together in person every Sunday, there’s something powerful going on. I wanted to understand how they draw all these people together. It’s true that it’s hard to scale the kind of dense relational networks that we talk about in relational organizing, but we have a ton of evidence that you can. It happens across megachurches every week, and there’s no inherent reason that I’ve seen that says that can only happen in a church environment.

It’s true that it’s hard to scale the kind of dense relational networks that we talk about in relational organizing, but we have a ton of evidence that you can.

96% of the budget of these megachurches comes from individual donations and most megachurches are growing. People are committing real resources to these places, which tells me that people are hungry for opportunities to be part of relational communities. When they find it, then those communities have a natural scalability to them.

Now, one thing that’s really different about churches relative to a lot of relational organizing that happens in more issue-based civic and political spaces is that churches have a natural organizational unit to them. If I’m part of a church, then I might tithe, I might sign up as a member, or as a congregant. There are different ways in which there’s an organization, and that organization has a governing board, it has a leader, all the things that go into self-governing associations. It has a structure to it. Often it has a physical space, but not always.

In contrast, a lot of times, the kind of relational organizing that we’re doing, going door to door around issues, is trying to pick people off one by one from their natural social environments. That’s what is really hard to scale. Yet, we have decades and decades of data that tell us there are other ways we can do it. When you organize through structures, school boards, churches, gun clubs, hobby organizations, YMCAs, libraries, where there’s a natural base, then it’s a lot faster to scale.

Sarah Stamper: In many civic contexts, success is defined by what’s easiest to count—clicks, contacts, turnout, short-term engagement metrics. What are the dangers of measuring only what’s easy rather than what actually builds power? Are there indicators you think better capture whether civic capacity is genuinely growing or eroding over time?

Hahrie Han: I hope that one lesson people from my work is this idea that it’s not just that we get people involved that matters, it’s how we get them involved that really matters.

I’ve spent my career studying the micro foundations of collective action. The key finding that comes out across all these different kinds of studies that I’ve done–from political campaigns to community organizing to issue-based work to church-based work to whatever–is that how you engage people affects what we’re able to accomplish together. I totally understand why we count clicks and likes and actions and things like that because those are observable behaviors that give us a sense of what’s happening. But if that’s the only thing we count, then we’re only getting a partial sense of the picture for the reasons that we already talked about. So what does it mean to measure not just what people do, but also whether they’re building the kind of capacity that we need?

I always think about it at the micro, meso, and macro levels. At the micro level, we want to understand whether or not people are not only taking action, but also developing those kinds of strategic, agentic capacities. We have to rely on some survey data to be able to capture some of the more effective orientations that we know underlie that kind of capacity. But then we also want to look at the meso level, which is about building collective vehicles or structures through which people can take action. You could have individuals who have all the affective and behavioral orientations that we need to take civic action. But if they’re doing it alone, it’s ultimately not going to build the kind of collective capacity that we need. We have to measure organizations at the meso level and then finally institutional change at the macro level.

You could have individuals who have all the affective and behavioral orientations that we need to take civic action. But if they’re doing it alone, it’s ultimately not going to build the kind of collective capacity that we need.

Sarah Stamper: If our metrics and incentives shape behavior, they also shape the ecosystem itself. If you were designing civic infrastructure for the next 20 years and not the next election cycle, what would you prioritize?

Hahrie Han: There’s a famous political scientist who wrote in the mid-20th century, Albert Hirschman, who has this terrific book called “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty” that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. The idea behind it is that market-based organizations operate on the logic of exit. So if I don’t like your “product,” then I leave. If I don’t like Cheerios, I go buy Chex. If I don’t like Heinz Ketchup, I go by Hunts. I can go to the store and can pick different products based on what I like.

But the logic of civic and political organizations, he argues, should operate on this logic of voice, which means that if I don’t like the product—which could be a candidate, a policy, or a position—then instead of exiting, instead of just leaving like we might with a different type of “product,” I should fight and try to exercise voice within the organization to get the organization to change. That distinction between exit and voice as the dominating logic behind what differentiates market-based organizations and civic organizations is a foundational insight.

The next question is, what does it take to build voice-based organizations? In the 21st century, people are so accustomed to thinking about network-based activity and thinking that you can’t please everybody. We should instead be thinking about the mechanisms of loyalty, which is what the third part of his argument is— that we need to generate people’s willingness and commitment to exercising voice when they disagree and build organizations in which disagreement is allowed.

If I were redesigning a civic architecture that would work for what we need in our moment, whether it’s online or offline, digital or not, I would be thinking about the measures of self-governing, voice-based organizations to ensure we have a supply of civic opportunity that matches what we know we need to build the civic capacity that we want.

If I were redesigning a civic architecture that would work for what we need in our moment…I would be thinking about the measures of self-governing, voice-based organizations to ensure we have a supply of civic opportunity that matches what we know we need to build the civic capacity that we want.

Sarah Stamper: Your lab’s civic opportunity mapping shows stark disparities in where people can find meaningful participation. What surprised you most about that data? And what should funders and practitioners be doing differently in response?

Hahrie Han: One of the things I was most surprised by is that in about 80% of counties in America, the top providers of civic opportunity are still social and fraternal organizations and faith-based institutions. Social-fraternal organizations include sororities, fraternities, Elks, Masons, Rotary Clubs, ethnic clubs, hometown associations, hobby groups, and so on. Along with faith-based institutions, they are the top providers of civic opportunity. They’re the ones who invite people into civic life most often.

What that tells me is that the places where people are gathering to come together are really still the same kind of places that they’ve always gathered and tried to come together. Those kinds of organizations still matter for building the kind of civic fabric that we need, for tilling the soil in the ways to make civic life work.

We’ve also been delighted to see the way funders and other organizations have built on these insights–about where the civic deserts are and what providers of civic opportunity look like–to try to make investments to renew civic architecture in certain places. For example, we’ve done a lot of work with an organization called the Trust for Civic Life, which is really a consortium of funders that have come together to try to invest in a set of pilot counties to see if they can reinvigorate civic life by building civic opportunity.

Sarah Stamper: Murmuration’s research shows that despite the challenges many Americans face, hope has held steady across the country. Even amid financial strain, rising stress, and widespread burnout, hope has held steady—an often overlooked but powerful sign of community resilience.

I would love for you to talk about examples or ways that you think movements can actually sustain hope without denying the loss or the failure or the risks that we’re experiencing. How are you thinking about hope in this moment?

Hahrie Han: I love the Maimonides quote that says, “hope is belief in the plausibility of the possible, not only the necessity of the probable.” I feel the most hopeless when I look at data and it says, probabilistically speaking, that we’re heading in this direction or that direction or somewhere negative. Hope requires a leap of faith that we can do things that are unexpected. Anyone who’s been part of a really vibrant community knows that it’s true that we can do unexpected things if we invest in each other.

Hope requires a leap of faith that we can do things that are unexpected. Anyone who’s been part of a really vibrant community knows that it’s true that we can do unexpected things if we invest in each other.

I feel most hopeful when I am in a relationship or in dialogue with everyday Americans just living their lives, trying to do work, and trying to build their community. I feel most hopeless when I spend all my time with policymakers or funders in DC.

When I first started as an organizer, before I was a scholar, one of my mentors told me, “people are people are people,” and you have to always remember that. I still feel like that’s true, that when I’m on the ground with people, I’m reminded that we might disagree, we might have different politics, we might have all these different things that seem to divide us, but then in the end, people are people are people. Once you recognize that, then it’s hard not to feel hopeful.

Sarah Stamper: People are people are people—but you’re a person who just won a MacArthur Fellowship! Congratulations. That fellowship is often framed as both recognition for past work, but also freedom to reset or expand your research agenda. Can you give us a glimpse of what might come next and what this unlocks for you?

Hahrie Han: It’s such an enormous privilege and gift, not to mention a total shock to receive the fellowship. It was completely unexpected. It’s not like I had been planning for it, so I’ve had to spend a few months thinking about what makes the most sense.

I don’t know that I’ve totally landed on it, but—not unrelated to everything that we just talked about—I have a sense that the underlying paradigm that most people have about how public life works is somewhat broken. We’re at a moment where we need a different paradigm that helps us understand how we can rebuild the very foundations of what public and civic life can be in America. I would love to be able to develop a project that can help move us towards that alternate paradigm.

Right now, too many people experience public life as a spectacle that they’re only invited to consume every two to four years, maybe.

Right now, too many people experience public life as a spectacle that they’re only invited to consume every two to four years, maybe. When they’re invited to consume it, they don’t really like the choices that are before them. So a lot of people are responding with a kind of fight or flight response that is not unreasonable, given the way in which they feel disempowered from the system. There are glimmers where people are rebuilding a different kind of paradigm that is grounded in practice that recognizes people as architects of their own future. I would love to be able to do some kind of work that helps us bring that paradigm to life.

Sarah Stamper: We’ll stay tuned for that. I’m very excited to have the opportunity to speak with you and to see where your work goes next. And as always, thank you so much for being in community with us and for being in this conversation.

About Hahrie Han
Hahrie Han is the Inaugural Director of the SNF Agora Institute, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Professor of Political Science, and Faculty Director of the P3 Research Lab at Johns Hopkins University. She is an award-winning author of five books and numerous scholarly articles. Her latest book (Knopf 2024), about faith and race in America with a focus on evangelical megachurches, was named to the New York Times list of 100 Notable Books of the Year in 2024, and the New Yorker’s list of Recommended Books for 2024. She has also written for scholarly and public outlets ranging from the New York Times and the Washington Post to the American Political Science Review, Nature Human Behavior, and the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). She is a 2025 recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship (so-called “genius grants”), is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, was named a 2022 Social Innovation Thought Leader of the Year by the World Economic Forum’s Schwab Foundation, and delivered the Tanner Lectures at Harvard University in 2024.

About Sarah Stamper
Sarah Stamper has been a neuroscientist for over 15 years, specializing in the quantitative analysis of behavior and systems. At Murmuration, Sarah leads a team of data and scientific experts building cutting-edge data and insights that empower partners to better understand, engage, and mobilize their communities. She also authors State of Us, a series that explores what America is feeling, thinking, and moving toward together, for Murmuration’s Substack. Before joining Murmuration, she led product and data science at Helm, a civic technology company. She also previously led research at the Art & Science Group, providing valuable data and insights to K-12 institutions, higher education, and nonprofit organizations, shaping their approaches to community engagement and strategic planning.

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