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If knowledge is power, then the democratization of research methods could result in the empowerment of members in their organizations. In multi-stakeholder cooperatives, this is a challenge at the heart of the production process. This article examines to explore this relationship between participative democracy and participatory action research (PAR) in a cooperative, based on an experiment conducted by two researcher-members within the rail cooperative Railcoop. Among its 14,000 members, about 800 of them are involved in 30 member circles. This case study highlights the contributions and limitations of a PAR to nourish the participatory democracy of a cooperative. The theoretical framework combines participatory democracy with surveys and PAR, drawing on the reference literature on the social economy.