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Civil Society and the Legacies of Dictatorship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Michael Bernhard  and
Ekrem Karakoç
Ekrem Karakoç
Affiliation:
Penn State University
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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.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 59 , Issue 4 , July 2007 , pp. 539 - 567
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 2007

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36 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.

37 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 (fn. 4) maintain “posttotalitarian” as a distinct regime type due to its past legacies and its unique organizational pattern of social life.

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40 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.

41 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.

42 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'etat), and Chavez's 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.

43 Today, many think of Germany, Austria, and Italy as not very different from other OEOD 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.

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46 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.

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48 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 Schofer, Evan and Fourcade-Gourinchas, Marion, “The Structural Contexts of Civic Engagement: Voluntary Association Membership in Comparative Perspective,” American Sociological Review 66 (December 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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52 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.

53 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.

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