Civil Society and the Legacies of Dictatorship

Abstract

The literature on civil society in postcommunist regimes highlights its weakness as compared with civil society in other democracies. In this article the authors make a general argument on how different patterns of antecedent dictatorship affect the development of civil society across a range of democracies. They examine the slow emergence of two behaviors associated with a robust civil society—participation in organizational life and in protest—and explain variation across countries as a function of regime history. They draw their individual-level data from the World Values Survey and analyze the behavior of over forty-one thousand citizens from forty-two democracies. Using methods of hierarchical linear modeling to control for both national-level and individual-level factors, the authors find that different types of dictatorship and variation in their duration produce different negative legacies for the development of civil society.

Autocratic Rule and Social Capital: Evidence from Imperial China

“…In particular, post-Communist societies are characterized by lower membership in civic organizations. Bernhard and Karakoç (2007) discuss the extent to which this is a general phenomenon characteristic of post-totalitarian societies.…”

Post-Soviet informality: towards theory-building

“…Many scholars have demonstrated that communist institutional (political and economic) and individual (attitudinal-behavioural) legacies have a long-lasting and continuous effect on former communist societies (Jowitt, 1992;Magner, 2005;Bernhard and Karakoç, 2007;Dimitrova-Grajzl and Simon, 2010;Pop-Eleches and Tucker, 2013). The impact of the former regime's legacy on informal institutions has also been discussed in the literature (Rose, 1995;Gibson, 2001;Howard, 2003;Gel'man, 2004;Grødeland, 2007).…”

Institutional Subsystems and the Survival of Democracy: Do Political and Civil Society Matter?

“…For the large majority of cases civil society and party institutionalization are democratic resource that take shape at the beginning of an episode, partially shaped by their authoritarian legacies (Bernhard & Karakoç 2007;Hicken and Kuhonta 2014;Rueschemeyer, Stephens, & Stephens 1994) and partially shaped by dynamics of their transitions. On average, the relative size of the between democratic episode variance to the within democratic episode variance is on the order of 4.64x larger.…”

“…A great deal of work has been done on the weakness of civil society in the postcommunist region as a potential threat to sustained democracy in the region (Howard, 2003;Bernhard & Karakoç, 2007;Pop-Eleches & Tucker, 2013). 5 However, there is no consensus regarding the salutary effects of civil society on democracy.…”