On the relationship between democratic institutionalization and civil society involvement: new evidence from Turkey

This study uses a nation-wide representative survey from 2004 to explore the link between civil society involvement and civic attitudes in Turkey. The article argues that, besides civic attitudes, political attitudes are also significant in explaining membership in ‘Olson type’ institutions, while membership in ‘Putnam type’ institutions does not depend on attitudinal variables. The article concludes that low civil society participation with a gender gap and intolerance of rural participants raises significant questions about the democratic potential of civil society in Turkey.     

When government fails us: trust in post-socialist civil organizations

The research for this article was motivated by a noticeable discrepancy between levels of participation and trust in post-socialist civil organizations. While civic participation in Central and Eastern Europe is almost nonexistent, levels of trust in post-socialist civil organizations compare favourably to those in Western Europe. The first aim of this article is to understand why citizens place relatively high trust in post-socialist civil organizations. The political context, within which civil organizations operate, reveals one explanation for the high levels of trust in civil organizations: government corruption dissuades citizens from relying on state institutions and creates a void that is filled by informal networks of association and civil organizations. Empirical evidence demonstrates that trust in civil organizations focused on socioeconomic and political development is higher among citizens who express concern about corruption in their country. The second aim of this article is to understand the discrepancy between levels of trust and civic participation. A novel interpretation of past findings suggests that civil organizations' effectiveness, professionalization, transactional capacity and orientation toward service provision may garner citizens' trust while parallel neglect of grassroots mobilization leaves civil organizations short of capitalizing on that trust. Civil organizations' limited focus on interest aggregation, mobilization and representation raises doubts as to whether observers of civil society in the region should look to these organizations as its core component.     

Government co-option of civil society: exploring the AKP’s role within Turkish women’s CSOs

Mainstream academic and policy literature emphasizes the nexus between an active and vibrant civil society sector and greater political accountability. As a result, support for civil society has become central to international policy efforts to strengthen democracy in the Middle East North Africa (MENA) region. However, the empirical evidence presented in this article questions the validity of this assumption. Drawing on information gathered through 38 in-depth qualitative interviews with women’s organizations from across the seven administrative regions of Turkey, and key representatives from the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), this article analyses the role of the AKP government in co-opting and influencing women’s organizations in Turkey. The results that emerge demonstrate that the government is actively involved in fashioning a civil society sector that advances their interests and consolidates their power. Independent women’s organizations report that they are becoming increasingly excluded from policy and legislative discussions, as seemingly civic organizations are supported and often created by the government to replace them. These organizations function to disseminate government ideas in society and to provide a cloak of democratic legitimacy to policy decisions. These findings and their implications have significant consequences for theory and policy on civil society and its role in supporting democracy.     

Whom do international donors support in the name of civil society?

International funding of civil society organisations within the framework of support for democratisation processes has increased significantly in recent years. Yet this raises a set of questions quite apart from the effectiveness of the activities of the recipient organisations. Who are these groups? Whom do they represent? What effect does international funding have on their organisational workings and their rootedness in their local societies and political systems? This article presents the results of a survey that examined the sources of financing, level of organisation, domestic constituencies, and relationships to political parties of 16 civil society groups in Latin America that received support from the National Endowment for Democracy in 1999. It finds that while the groups demonstrate a remarkable diversity in their sources of funding, all of them receive the lion's share of financing from international donors. The author argues, however, that given the scant possibilities for domestically generated funding, this dependence is to be expected. The article concludes with a series of questions about the meaning of international support for local groups in developing democracies and the potential effects it may have on de-linking such groups from their broader political and party system.     

Democracy promotion: the relationship of political parties and civil society

Organizations involved in the growing field of democracy promotion need to find effective ways to aid both political parties and civil organizations and, where necessary, to foster close collaboration between them. But they also must respect their autonomy and help them realize their own democratic objectives. It is important to recognize the differences between the two sectors: civil society should not be subordinate to parties, and it would be a mistake to wrap the party sector into an undifferentiated concept of civil society. Strategies to assist democracy should, then, distinguish between four main political contexts: authoritarian; emerging democracy; post-dictatorial situations where government is not committed to democracy; and war-torn or post-conflict countries.     

Reassessing the Role of Civil Society Organizations in the Transition to Democracy in Spain

Spain's democratization process has mainly been described as a settlement between political elites in which civil society organizations played little part. Yet the literature on Eastern European democratization sets great store by the role of civil society, both for transition and consolidation. Does this different treatment reflect the approach adopted by analysts or the actual contrasting presence of civil society organizations in the relevant periods? The question prompts this re-examination of the role of civil society organizations in the Spanish transition. It finds that the answer depends in part on definitions of civil society, but mainly on the approach taken by authors in presenting their accounts. It finds that the elite settlement perspective silences or removes agency from the Spanish civil society organizations active in the transition.

An alternative view is developed through an in-depth review of the events following the death of the dictator General Franco in 1975 and a textual analysis of Spain's actual definitive settlement, the 1978 Constitution. The research demonstrates that civil society organizations were responsible for disrupting the dictatorship's intention to maintain an authoritarian regime, leaving it no option but to negotiate with civil society organizations such as political parties and trade unions, which were pursuing their own strategic goals towards co-construction of a socially advanced democracy. The article's approach bridges the gulf between top-down and bottom-up accounts of political change in Spain at the end of the Franco regime.     

马来西亚华文作家的文化忧患意识

本文主要探讨马来西亚华文作家(简称马华作家)在族群政治浓烈的氛围中所衍生出来的忧患意识。马华作家对文化传承及身份认同问题一向极为敏感,大部分的马华作家都摆不开政治议题的纠缠。在敏感的政治论辩及维护中华文化的浪声中,马华作家如何调适内心中的不安,对中华文化发展的危机作出什么反应?如何面对马来霸权文化?     

Anchoring the Peace: Civil Society Actors in Peace Accords and Durable Peace

Is peace more likely to prevail when the peace accord includes civil society actors such as religious groups, women's organizations, and human rights groups? This is the first statistical study that explores this issue. The article develops key claims in previous research regarding the role of civil society actors and durable peace, and proposes a set of hypotheses that focus on legitimacy in this process. The hypotheses are examined by employing unique data on the inclusion of civil society actors in all peace agreements in the post–Cold War period. The statistical analysis shows that inclusion of civil society actors in the peace settlement increases the durability of peace. The results further demonstrate that peace accords with involvement from civil society actors and political parties in combination are more likely to see peace prevail. The findings also suggest that inclusion of civil society has a particularly profound effect on the prospects for overall peace in nondemocratic societies.     

Organizations,Credibility, and the Psychology of Collective Action

Political organizations frequently attempt to recruit sympathetic citizens to support their causes. Doing so requires communicating credibility—that is, persuading potential new supporters that they can actually achieve the goals they set out to achieve. In this article we investigate two of the predominant kinds of information that organizations might use to establish credibility: retrospective information (about past successes) and prospective information (about future plans). Using one field experiment and one survey experiment, we find that retrospective information fails to increase people’s willingness to spend scarce resources supporting political organizations. We find that this occurs because information about past successes suggests that the organization can succeed without any additional help. In contrast, we find that prospective information motivates new participants to become active.     

Representative Democracy and Fighting Domestic Terrorism

Does more representative government improve states' ability to fight domestic terrorism? In prior work, democracies are seen as more susceptible to terrorism because their respect for human rights prevents them from fully eliminating terrorist groups. However, such extrajudicial aggression could also alienate large portions of the population and create the ideal conditions for an insurgency. I argue that since terrorism is the lowest-capacity form of political violence, it is natural that states that do best at deterring political violence experience the most terrorism. While representative democracies should see terrorist groups initiate spells of attacks at a greater frequency, full political representation should also galvanize major political actors to unite and eliminate terrorist threats. I test this assertion through statistical models that treat the process of terrorist group initiation and its duration and intensity separately. Results not only show that less consolidated democracies and autocracies experience longer and more intense terrorist campaigns, but that, in support of the theory's mechanisms, groups are more likely to shift to terrorism from insurgency when their political base gains more political representation. The results call the division among research programs of various political violence types into question.     

Civil society

The idea of civil society has proved very elusive, escaping conceptual grasps and evading sure-footed negotiation of the concept itself. Resurrected in a very definite historical setting, that of authoritarian states, the concept of civil society came to signify a set of social and political practices that sought to engage with state power. The close connection with the re-emergence of the concept and the collapse of dictatorial states made civil society attractive to a variety of political agents pursuing different agendas: expanding the market at the expense of the state, transiting from mass politics to single-issue and localised campaigns, undermining confidence in accepted modes of representation such as political parties, and in general shrinking the domain of the state and that of accepted modes of politics. That the concept of civil society could suit such a variety of different political projects is cause for some alarm, for it might well mean that civil society has come to mean everything to everyone remotely interested in it.     

Collective memory of the Spanish civil war: The case of the political amnesty in the Spanish transition to democracy

This article focuses on two interrelated, but relatively ignored, factors in the Spanish transition to democracy (1975–78): first, the most important political mobilizations of the period in which the people demanded an amnesty for the political prisoners of the dictatorship; second, the presence of a collective memory of the Spanish civil war (1936–39), whose repetition was now to be avoided at all costs. It argues that the many collective actions that took place in Spain in favour of an amnesty were, to a great extent, inspired by a widespread desire for reconciliation among Spaniards. Spanish society had suffered a deep split as a consequence of the civil war and, because of the presence of the Francoist regime, no symbolic measures to reach national reconciliation had taken place. The climate generated by the often violent confrontations between police and demonstrators (and not only during demonstrations in favour of the amnesty), and the number of resulting deaths and injuries, made the people remember the serious problems of public order that had confronted the Second Republic (1931–36), whose collapse marked the beginning of the Spanish civil war. These factors help explain why the main political parties of the left felt the need to contain the very mobilization process that they had helped to create. The generous amnesty of October 1977, passed by a democratically elected parliament, was interpreted as the symbolic overcoming of the division among Spaniards that resulted from the dramatic civil confrontation of the 1930s.     

Civil society and substantive democracy: Governance and the state of law in Belgium

Since the late 1980s, democratic institutions and an active civil society are being prescribed as important ingredients and preconditions to reduce poverty, social exclusion, and violent civil strife. Multi-party systems and elections are seen as the most important expressions of formal democracy. This paper argues that more attention is needed to substantive democracy, which requires a greater understanding of the various legal-political variants within a democratic framework. The paper discusses in some depth the crisis of governance in Belgium. The analysis raises questions about the relationship between 'political' and 'civil society', and between social movements and political parties.     

Rethinking the Relationship between Inclusive Institutions and Political Violence

Abstract

In this paper we empirically reexamine the debate over the conflict reducing properties of inclusive political institutions. We examine the purported violence reducing effects of proportional representation (PR) electoral systems, parliamentarism, and federalism, conditioning their effects on ethnic fractionalization and whether a country is conflict prone. In other words, are these institutions more effective in countries that have already experienced major conflict or are they more effective in preventing conflict in countries that have not experienced major conflict? Using a data set that includes a sample of 81 countries and 2488 observations from 1973 to 2018, we test the conditional effects of proportional representation electoral systems, parliamentarism and federalism conditioning these by ethnicity and whether the country has experienced a major conflict (i.e., civil war). We find that these institutions have little effect on reducing the number of riots or political deaths, but PR electoral systems reduces ethnic violence when ethnic fractionalization is high. On the other hand PR electoral systems and parliamentarism reduce ethnic violence in conflict prone countries, but federalism increases the likelihood of ethnic violence. We discuss the implications of these findings with regard to arguments regarding inclusive power sharing arrangements and violence in post conflict environments.     

Questioning Tocqueville in Africa: continuity and change in civil society during Nigeria's democratization

The democratization literature commonly claims that democratic transitions require an independent civil society. However this view, which builds upon Tocqueville, reifies boundaries between state and society. It also over-predicts the likelihood that independent civil society organizations will engage in confrontation with the government. Drawing upon Hegel, I develop a two-dimensional model of civil society that clusters organizations according to goal orientation and autonomy. This illustrates how high levels of autonomy combined with goals that extend beyond an internal constituency are linked to democratization. I then examine Nigeria's civil society during the era of democratization between 1985 and 1998, and identify important changes in the political opportunity structure. I attribute changes in autonomy and goal orientation of organizations to three factors: transnational organizing, coalition building, and victimization. My findings question the assumption that autonomous organizations will challenge the state. Future research could explore links between the state mobilization during the 1990s and one-party dominance today.     

A Paradox of Success? Determinants of Political Support for President Fujimori

To what extent does a government's success in resolving a deep political and economic crisis strengthen its popular support? The Fujimori administration in Peru, which tackled both profound economic problems and a powerful guerrilla threat, constitutes a useful test case for this important question. Most observers of Peru assume that both Fujimori's success in improving the economy and in combating insurrectionary forces contributed substantially to his high popularity and his reelection victory. Regression analyses of survey and electoral data suggest, however, that the successful counterinsurgency campaign had no significant medium or long-term impact on presidential approval and electoral support. These surprising findings seem to reflect a paradox of success: when a government effectively combats a severe threat, such as rampant guerrilla violence, the salience of the issue diminishes subsequently and people's high appreciation for the president's accomplishment has an ever lower impact on their political attitudes and behavior.     

Parliamentary Questions,Newspaper Coverage,and Consumer Confidence in Times of Crisis: A Cross-National Comparison

This article investigates the interactions among parliamentary questions, newspaper coverage on the economic crisis, and consumer confidence. It focuses on France, Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands for the period 2005–2016. Based on insights from political agenda-setting and media effects research, we expect multidirectional relationships to be present. Parliamentary records and newspaper archives are used to analyze the monthly amount of attention for the economic crisis. Pooled time series models and vector autoregression analyses are employed to demonstrate that indeed, politicians, journalists, and citizens depend on one another, but also that remarkable cross-national and over-time differences exist. In the countries where the economy was severely damaged by the crisis (France and Spain), news coverage is less strongly affecting both parliamentarians and citizens. However, when the economic situation worsens, political agenda-setting influences get stronger,while media effects on consumer confidence becomeweaker over time.     

Civil society,the market and democracy in Latin America

‘Civil society’ has been used in a confusing variety of ways in Latin America by academics, policy‐makers, non‐governmental organizations and activists. This article explores the ambiguities in the usages of the concept over the last decade in a bid to rescue it from the danger of abandonment for having become all things to all people. If used rigorously, the concept remains a useful analytical tool for exploring the process and progress of democratization and capitalist development in Latin America. It encourages us to ask what difference a vibrant associational life can make to building more inclusive and sustainable democracies in Latin America. The case of Chile is used as an example of how ‘civil society’ opens up new questions for research in a country which many hail as the most successful example of economic and political liberalization in Latin America.     

How Accurate Are Survey Responses on Social Media and Politics?

How accurate are survey-based measures of social media use, in particular about political topics? We answer this question by linking original survey data collected during the U.S. 2016 election campaign with respondents’ observed social media activity. We use supervised machine learning to classify whether these Twitter and Facebook account data are content related to politics. We then benchmark our survey measures on frequency of posting about politics and the number of political figures followed. We find that, on average, our self-reported survey measures tend to correlate with observed social media activity. At the same time, we also find a worrying amount of individual-level discrepancy and problems related to extreme outliers. Our recommendations are twofold. The first is for survey questions about social media use to provide respondents with options covering a wider range of activity, especially in the long tail. The second is for survey questions to include specific content and anchors defining what it means for a post to be “about politics.”     

Civil society,political stability,and state power in Central Asia: cooperation and contestation

This article develops a concept of civil society in Central Asia distinct from that which emerged from the East European communist societies of the late 1980s. Kazakhstan presents a case study of a civil society that conceptually can be located between the vibrant civil society of the Baltic democracies and the civil society of the strongly repressive environments of Belarus or Uzbekistan. Kazakhstan's authoritarian structures and cultural traditions make it difficult to develop strong independent civic organizations – cooperation tends to mark state-civil society relations more than contestation, which shaped much of Eastern Europe's experience. Even in a context of relative affluence where civil society organizations are allowed some space to engage in critical activities, contestation tends to be minimized. This is only partially related to state suppression and cooptation; a political culture that views democratic processes as potentially destabilizing is also a significant factor. Kazakhstan represents a distinct Central Asian model of civil society, comparable to Russia but qualitatively different from that found in either Eastern or Western Europe, where civil society is less willing to confront the state, more cooperative with the authoritarian system, and wary of the potential for civic activism to degenerate into instability. Differentiating types of civil society is important because a key component of Western democracy assistance programmes has been providing assistance to build and strengthen civil societies. By refining our understanding of distinct civil society patterns in Central Asia, we can enhance our knowledge of political processes in this critical region, and we may improve the effectiveness of democracy assistance programmes. The study is grounded in field research, interviews, civil society workshops, survey research, and government documents.