The chapter examines the role of causality in politics, demonstrating how democratic politics shifted from a top-down causality, from divinity to monarchy, to a bottom-up causality, from the public to its representatives. This shift is evident in the establishment of periodic elections and democratic institutions, which are designed to legitimize causality derived from human agency. Concurrently, horizontal causality emerged through entities like political parties, civil society, and social media. However, this democratic causality has been weakening over recent decades due to several factors: the diminished capacity of political institutions to represent political causality, the illusion of a direct link between politicians and the public, particularly through mass media and social networks, and the erosion of the concept of “the public” as a democratic entity. In recent years, the public has experienced political fragmentation and lacks unifying forces like ideologies, parties, and labor unions. Another contributing factor to the weakening of causality is the declining faith in science and expertise, which are now associated with elitism. This has led to a weakening of quasi-scientific causality in politics and a rise of the “charisma of ignorance.”

The value of volunteering and associational groups for social political life has long interested scholars studying modern democratic societies. Since Alexis de Tocqueville published his seminal work on Democracy in America in the 1830s (2001), much focus has been on the good that volunteering in civic associations does for fostering pro-social behavior and for building public participatory processes in democratic governments. A more recent and critical view asserts that the work of civic associations can also be socially corrosive, paternalistic, intolerant of outsiders, geared toward corporate self-interest, and actively antidemocratic. In addition, much volunteering in civic groups is shallow, menial, apolitical social activity that holds little, if any, transformative social potential.