Nonprofit organizations (NPOs) are often touted as "schools of democracy" that teach civic values and skills to individuals, thereby strengthening democracy. We explore this role by asking how NPOs' internal democratic and managerial practices relate to their encouragement of political engagement in society. We use survey data collected from a random sample of NPOs in the Vienna metropolitan region. The results suggest that the extent to which NPOs use managerial practices is negatively related to their degree of organizational democracy, but that greater use of both democratic and managerial practices is positively related to endorsing political engagement.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/08997640241278634