Civic Tech, Structured Skepticism, and Community Trust: How Grassroots Organizers in Taiwan Promote Digital Age Democratic Resilience

I apply Taiwan’s civic tech community as a case study to explore how grassroots organizers in digital age democracies seek to promote democratic resilience. I conducted 10 semi-structured interviews with 11 members of Taiwan’s civic tech community and analyzed their self-perception, goals, and the challenges they face to promote democratic resilience and counter increasingly prevalent digital disinformation campaigns. Applying Papakostas’s (2012) concept of structured skepticism, defined as the institutionalization of distrust and civic capacity to scrutinize power, I found that civic tech organizers in Taiwan seek to promote democratic resilience in two core ways. First, they foster bottom-up structured skepticism towards government and media consumption. Second, they mitigate community skepticism that inflames political division and limits civic tech’s mission reach. These findings demonstrate the importance of grassroots actors in modern democracies by exemplifying how they take personal responsibility for promoting democratic resilience rather than passively reacting to state actions. Taiwan’s civic tech community exemplifies the vital but constrained role civil society can play in fortifying democracy against both internal stressors and increasingly sophisticated external threats.