Civil society and the legacies of dictatorship

World Politics

Volumn 59, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 539-567

  Bernhard, Michael ^a   Karakoç, Ekrem ^a  

^a PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CIVIL SOCIETY; DEMOCRACY; POLITICAL SYSTEM; POST-COMMUNISM;

EID: 38849158494     PISSN: 00438871     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/wp.2008.0001     Document Type: Article

References (87)

1. Dankwart Rustow, "Transitions to Democracy," Comparative Politics 2 (April 1970);
2. and Andreas Schedler, "What Is Democratic Consolidation?" Journal of Democracy 9 (April 1998).
3. Almond and Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1965).
4. Ronald Inglehart, Pippa Norris, and Christian Welzel, "Gender Equality and Democracy," Comparative Sociology 1, no. 3-4 (2002);
5. and Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, "Islamic Culture and Democracy: Testing the 'Clash of Civilizations' Thesis," Comparative Sociology 1, no. 3-4 (2002).
6. Linz and Stepan, Problems of Democratic Consolidation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
7. Putnam, Making Democracy Work Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
8. Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, World Values Surveys and European Values Survey 1999-2001 (computer file) (Ann Arbor: Institute for Social Research, 2002).
9. Verba, "The Remaking of Political Culture," in Lucian Pye and Sidney Verba, eds., Political Culture and Political Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965).
10. David P. Conradt, "Changing German Political Culture," in Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, eds., The Civic Culture Revisited (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1990);
11. and Russell J.Dalton, "A Changing Social Consciousness," in Peter H. Merkl, ed., The Federal Republic at Forty (New York: New York University Press, 1989).
12. Leonardo Morlino and Marco Tarchi, "The Dissatisfied Society: The Roots of Political Change in Italy," European Journal of Political Research 30 (July 1996).
13. Ronald Inglehart, "The Silent Revolution in Europe: Intergenerational Change in Post-Industrial Societies," American Political Science Review 65 (December 1971).
14. Scott Flanagan, "Value Cleavages, Contextual Influences, and the Vote," in Scott Flanagan, Shinsaku Kohei, Ichiro Miyake, Bradley M. Richardson, and Joji Watanuki, eds., The Japanese Voter (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991);
15. and Yun-Han Chu, Larry Diamond, and Dob Chull Shin, "Halting Progress in Korea and Taiwan," Journal of Democracy 12 (January 2001).
16. Jose Ramon Montero, Richard Gunther, and Mariano Torcal,"Democracy in Spain: Legitimacy, Discontent, and Dissatisfaction," Studies in Comparative International Development 32, no. 3 (1997);
17. Dieter Fuchs, Giovanna. Guidorossi, and Palle Svensson, "Support for the Democratic System," in Hans-Dieter Klingemann and Dieter Fuchs, eds., Citizens and the State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995);
18. and Chu, Diamond, and Shin (fin. 11).
19. William Mishler and Richard Rose, "Trajectories of Fear and Hope: Support for Democracy in Post-Communist Europe," Comparative Political Studies 28 (January 1996);
20. and Geoffrey Evans and Stephen Whitefield," Politics and Economics of Democratic Commitment: Support for Democracy in Transition Societies," British Journal of Political Science 25 (October 1995).
21. Russell J. Dalton, "Communists and Democrats: Democratic Attitudes in the Two Germanies," British Journal of Political Science 24 (October 1994);
22. and Robert Rohrschneider, Learning Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
23. Richard Rose and Doh Chull Shin. "Democratization Backwards," British Journal of Political Science 31 (April 2001).
24. Freedom House, "Country Report, Russia," Nations in Transit 2004, http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page= 47&nit=342&year=2004 (accessed March 2,2006).
25. It is worth recalling that Almond and Verba (fn. 2) also found significant differences in organizational participation in the five countries that they studied (p. 247).
26. Putnam (fn. 5); and idem, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000).
27. Social Capital and Democracy: An Interdependent Relationship," American Sociological Review 67 (April 2002);
28. and Natalia Letki and Geoffrey Evans, "Endogenizing Social Trust: Democratization in East-Central Europe," British Journal of Political Science 35 (July 2005).
29. Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelene Huber Stephens, and John D. Stephens, Capitalist Development and Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1992);
30. Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market (New York: Cambridge University Press1991);
31. and Linz and Stepan (fn. 4).
32. O'Donnell and Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 48.
33. Linz and Stepan (fn. 4), 55-56.
34. Ibid., 62, 64.
35. Ibid., 9-10, 232-33, 271-72. One case that demonstrates the plausibility of such fears is Weimar Germany;
36. see Sheri Berman, "Civil Society and the Collapse of the Weimar Republic," World Politics 49 (April 1997).
37. Howard, The Weakness of Civil Society in Post-Communist Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
38. Greskovits, The Political Economy of Protest and Patience (Budapest: Central European University, 1998).
39. Christopher J. Anderson and Silvia M. Mendes, "Learning to Lose: Election Outcomes, Experience with Democracy, and Political Protest Potential," British Journal of Political Science 36 (January 2005).
40. Ekiert and Kubik, "Contentious Politics in New Democracies: East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia, 1989-93," World Politics 50 (July 1998);
41. and idem, Rebellious Civil Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999).
42. Howard (fn. 25), chap. 4.
43. Leszek Kolakowski, "The Myth of Human Self-Identity: Unity of Civil and Political Society in Socialist Thought," in Leszek Kolakowski and Stuart Hampshire, eds., The Socialist Idea (New York: Basic Books 1974);
44. Piotr Ogrodzinski, "Civil Society and the Market under Real Socialism," in Michael Bernhard and Henryk Szlajfer, eds., From the Polish Underground: Selections from Krytyka,'1978-1999 (University Park. Penn State University Press, 1995);
45. Michael Bernhard, "Civil Society after the First Transition: Dilemmas of Post-communist Democratization in Poland and Beyond," Communist and Post-Communist Studies 29 (September 1996);
46. Ekiert and Kubik (fn. 28, 1999): and Howard (fn. 25).
47. Some argue that this legacy goes beyond the Stalinist project and is a product of the developmental trajectory of Eastern Europe as a region. For a sustained historical argument along these lines, see
48. Valerie Bunce, "The Historical Origins of the East-West Divide: Civil Society, Political Society, and Democracy in Europe," in Nancy Bermeo and Philip Nord, eds., Civil Society before Democracy: Lessons from Nineteenth-Century Europe (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000).
49. Juan Linz, "Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes," in Fred I. Greenstein and Nelson Polsby, eds., Handbook of Political Science, vol. 3 (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1975).
50. Terry Karl, "Dilemmas of Democratization in Latin America," Comparative Politics 23 (October 1990);
51. James Mahoney, The Legacies of Liberalism: Path Dependence and Political Regimes in Central America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001);
52. and Grzegorz Ekiert, The State against Society Political Crises and Their Aftermath in East Central Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
53. Linz (fn. 31), 191-92.
54. Ibid., 264.
55. Green's work on in the strength of postcommunist civil society shows strong variation between countries that are part of the Confederation of Independent States and those that are not. We suspect that this is a product of how long different postcommunist countries were under the system. The CIS countries bad been constituent parts of the USSR since the end of the Russian Civil War. The non-CIS states were in large part added to the USSR in 1939 or became part of the Soviet bloc after VAVII. See Andrew T. Green, "Comparative Development of Post-Communist Civil Societies," Europe-Asia Studies 54 (May 2002).
56. It is clear that the longer a dictatorship is in place, the slimmer the chances that historical parties will resurrect themselves. In the post-Soviet countries there are no significant historical parties. In Eastern Europe the record is a little more complex. For instance, the Christian democrats and the liberals reemerged in Romania as important opposition parties, and in the Czech Republic the social democrats have even led successive governments. In Poland and Hungary, by contrast, historical parties have been much less important actors. In Southern Europe and Latin America, the resurrection of parties has been much more common.
57. In the case of the postcommunist countries, democratic transitions were not made directly from the totalitarian phase of their development but were made from a posttotalitarian phase. This had important ramifications for the extent of violence used by the regime against the society (the curtailment of terror as an instrument of social change) and for which areas of life were homogenized and administered by the state (a retreat from the aspiration to control private life and leisure activity). Still state control of social organization and the requirement to participate in public rituals of support remained. Though posttotalitarian regimes approached more conventional forms of authoritarianism over time, Linz and Stepan (ffi. 4) maintain "posttotalitarian" as a distinct regime type due to its past legacies and its unique organizational pattern of social life.
58. For details on the coding scheme used, see Michael Bernhard, Timothy Nordstrom, and Christopher Reenock, "Economic Performance, Institutional Intermediation, and Democratic Survival," Journal of Politics 63 (September 2001), 783-85.
59. Linz and Stepan (fn. 4);
60. and Robert Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971).
61. While we have forty-two democracies, we have forty-three different legacies. The German sample has been divided into East and West to control for the different regime histories of the two parts of the country before unification.
62. Belgium, Denmark, France, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands had interruptions in democracy during the World War II German occupation. However, democracy was restored after the war and took up where it had left off when interrupted by the occupation. In all four countries there was a continuity of the constitution, and politicians not discredited by collaboration with the Axis were restored to power. Thus we do not consider this interruption to be a breakdown in regime.
63. India is seen by many as the epitome of democracy in a developing country, and Venezuela has the reputation for being a stable Latin American democracy. However, the history of both countries is less stable than that of our long-term democracies. Democracy in India was suspended by Indira Gandhi in the mid-1970s, and Venezuela's long episode with democracy began only in 1958. The situation there, beginning in the 1990s, became quite unstable after several unsuccessful coup attempts by the current president, Hugo Chavez, several unsuccessful attempts to remove Chavez from power (by general strike, plebiscite, and coup d'état), and Chavezs rewriting of the constitution to enhance his own power. Because of concerns expressed by one of the reviewers of this article, we ran our models with India categorized as a long-term democracy to assure ourselves that its coding was not affecting our results. It had no effect.
64. Today, many think of Germany, Austria, and Italy as not very different from other OECD countries given their long postwar history as democracies. However, we felt that these countries, as a result of their histories, faced particular legacies with regard to civil society. And indeed their levels of organizational and protest behavior is below the mean figures for the long-term democracy group. At the suggestion of a reviewer we recategorized them as long-term democracies and reran our regressions. The recategorization caused many of our independent variables to lose significance. We read this as supportive of our categorization.
65. Russel1 J. Dalton and Alix van Sickle, "The Resource, Structural and Cultural Bases of Protest," Center for the Study of Democracy, http://repositories.cdlib.org/csd/05-11 (accessed May 8, 2006).
66. Linz (fn. 31);
67. and Linz and Stepan (fn. 4).
68. Monty Marshall and Keith Jaggers, Polity IV Dataset Users' Manual, www.cidcm.umd.edu/inscr/polity (accessed December 23, 2005). In some cases we corrected for what we considered to be inaccuracies for some countries. For instance, Polity codes Poland as having two different regimes in the period from the 1940s to the 1980s. Clearly this was a continuous regime ruled by the same party state over the course of this period.
69. Marco R. Steenbergen and Bradford S. Jones, "Modeling Multilevel Data Structures," American Journal of Political Science 46 (January 2002).
70. Since we were concerned about the skewness of our data, we ran a number of alternative specifications to see whether the findings were stable. For instance, some might argue that a Poisson model would be more appropriate for this analysis because our dependent variable is a count variable. We ran Poisson, OLS, and binomial versions of our models, and the results are consistent for both reduced and full maximum likelihood estimations. See Evan Schofer and Marion Fourcade-Gourinchas, "The Structural Contexts of Civic Engagement: Voluntary Association Membership in Comparative Perspective," American Sociological Review 66 (December 2001).
71. There is a controversy about whether to use group-mean versus grand-mean centering in the literature on multilevel models. Raudenbush and Bryk argue that in the absence of cross-level interactions grand mean centering is the most appropriate. Hox argues that if the object of interest is an interaction between an individual-level variable and a contextual variable, group mean centering is the better option. In this study, given the absence of any cross-level interaction variables, we use grand mean centering for our independent variables. See Stephen Raudenbush and Anthony Bryk, Hierarchical Linear Models (Newbury Park, Calif : Sage, 2002);
72. and Joop Hox, Multilevel Analysis (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002).
73. Eric Uslaner, The Moral Foundations of Trust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002);
74. and Brehm and Rahn (fn. 19).
75. We also ran versions of these models including a control variable for intensity of political partisanship which we derived from respondent self-placement along an ideological continuum. Since this was missing for a fairly substantial number of observations we do not include this variable in the analysis reported here. The results of these analyses were substantively the same as those reported.
76. In these figures the lines are drawn over the range of the least common denominator minimum and maximum values for the regime legacies (authoritarian 2, 81; totalitarian 6, 65). The figure of 35 represents the mean value for both types combined.
77. And we should add that in our sample we see little evidence that civil societies stay mobilized and complicate the task of establishing a viable political society as Linz and Stepan (fn. 4) feared was a possibility.
78. Jeffrey S. Kopstein and David A. Reilley, "Geographic Diffusion and the Transformation of the Postcommunist World," World Politics 53 (October 2000);
79. and M. Steven Fish, Democracy Derailed in Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
80. Paxton (fn. 19).
81. Anderson and Mendes (fn. 27).
82. Marshall and Jaggers (fn. 46).
83. The World Bank Group, World Development Indicators Online (1960-2005), http://publications.worldbank.org/WDI/ (accessed May 14,2006).
84. Bernhard, Nordstrom, and Reenock (fn. 38).
85. The World Bank Group (fn. 58). We ran several alternative specifications of this variable, including taking the average of the previous years (from two to eight). The different specifications did not change our findings for the main independent variables.
86. Arthur S. Banks, Cross-National Time Series Data Archive (Binghamton: Centre for Social Analysis, State University of New York, 2005).
87. Ronald Inglehart, Cultural Shift in Advanced Industrial Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).