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Constraining Is Enabling? Exploring the Influence of National Context on Civil Society Strength

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Abstract

This article analyses the influence of national context on civil society strength based on four key dimensions: level of democracy, political stability, rule of law and economic development. Whereas existing studies mainly focus on Western and post-communist countries, we explicitly include developing countries in our analysis. We use associational membership as proxy for civil society strength and include data of 53 countries. Rule of law, economic development and (to a lesser extent) political stability emerge from our multilevel regression models as the main factors affecting civil society membership. Unlike previous studies, we show that these relations are quadratic instead of linear. This means that where existing theories predict a drop in memberships in developing countries, we find a rise. In other words, harsh conditions actually strengthen civil society in terms of membership levels. We argue that this could be the case because reasons for CSO membership are essentially different in the developed and in the developing world. Contrary to theoretical assumptions, democratic rights do not appear critically important for civil society membership.

Résumé

Cet article analyse l’influence du contexte national sur le dynamisme de la société civile en tenant compte de quatre aspects clés : le niveau de démocratie, la stabilité politique, la primauté du droit et le développement économique. Les études existantes portent essentiellement sur les pays occidentaux et postcommunistes, mais nous intégrons de façon explicite les pays en développement dans notre analyse. Nous utilisons le nombre de membres d’associations comme indicateur sur le dynamisme de la société civile et intégrons les données de 53 pays. La primauté du droit, le développement économique et – dans une moindre mesure – la stabilité politique apparaissent dans nos modèles de régression multiniveaux comme les principaux facteurs ayant une incidence sur le nombre de membres de la société civile. Contrairement aux études précédentes, nous montrons que ces relations sont quadratiques plutôt que linéaires. Cela signifie que là où les théories existantes prévoient une baisse des adhésions dans les pays en développement, nous constatons une hausse. En d’autres termes, des conditions difficiles renforcent réellement la société civile en termes de niveaux d’adhésion. Nous croyons que cela pourrait être le cas, car les raisons pouvant expliquer l’adhésion des organisations de la société civile (OSC) sont fondamentalement différentes dans les pays développés et les pays en développement. Contrairement aux hypothèses théoriques, les droits démocratiques ne semblent pas avoir une importance essentielle pour le nombre de membres de la société civile.

Zusammenfassung

In diesem Beitrag wird der Einfluss des nationalen Kontextes auf die Stärke der Bürgergesellschaft beruhend auf vier wichtigen Dimensionen analysiert: Grad der Demokratie, politische Stabilität, Rechtsstaatlichkeit und wirtschaftliche Entwicklung. Während sich die meisten Studien hauptsächlich auf westliche und postkommunistische Länder konzentrieren, schließen wir Entwicklungsländer ausdrücklich in unsere Analyse ein. Wir verwenden die Verbandsmitgliedschaft als Indikator für die Stärke der Bürgergesellschaft und erfassen Daten aus 53 Ländern. In unseren mehrstufigen Regressionsmodellen stellen sich die Rechtsstaatlichkeit, die wirtschaftliche Entwicklung und (in einem geringeren Umfang) die politische Stabilität als die Hauptfaktoren heraus, die sich auf die Mitgliederschaft der Bürgergesellschaft auswirken. Im Gegensatz zu früheren Studien zeigen wir, dass diese Verbindungen quadratisch statt linear sind. Das heißt, dass in Fällen, in denen die bestehenden Theorien einen Rückgang bei den Mitgliedschaften in Entwicklungsländern voraussagen, wir einen Anstieg sehen. Mit anderen Worten stärken ungünstige Bedingungen die Bürgergesellschaft mit Bezug auf die Zahl der Mitgliedschaften. Wir behaupten, dass dies unter Umständen daran liegt, dass sich die Gründe für eine Mitgliedschaft in Bürgergesellschaftsorganisationen in den Industrienationen und den Entwicklungsländern grundlegend unterscheiden. Im Gegensatz zu den theoretischen Annahmen, erscheinen demokratische Rechte nicht ausschlaggebend für die Mitgliedschaften der Bürgergesellschaft zu sein.

Resumen

El presente artículo analiza la influencia del contexto nacional sobre la fortaleza de la sociedad civil basándose en cuatro dimensiones claves: el nivel de democracia, la estabilidad política, el imperio de la ley y el desarrollo económico. Mientras que los estudios existentes se centran principalmente en los países occidentales y poscomunistas, incluimos explícitamente a los países en vías de desarrollo en nuestro análisis. Utilizamos la pertenencia a asociaciones como indicador de la fortaleza de la sociedad civil e incluimos datos de 53 países. El imperio de la ley, el desarrollo económico y (en menor medida) la estabilidad política surgen de nuestros modelos de regresión multinivel como los principales factores que afectan a la pertenencia a la sociedad civil. Al contrario que estudios previos, mostramos que estas relaciones son cuadráticas en lugar de lineales. Esto significa que en aquellos casos en los que las teorías predicen una caída en la pertenencia en los países en vías de desarrollo, encontramos un aumento. En otras palabras, las duras condiciones fortalecen realmente a la sociedad civil en términos de niveles de pertenencia. Argumentamos que éste podría ser el caso, ya que los motivos para pertenecer a las organizaciones de la sociedad civil (OSC/CSO) son esencialmente diferentes en el mundo desarrollado y en el mundo en vías de desarrollo. Al contrario que los supuestos teóricos, los derechos democráticos no parecen fundamentalmente importantes para pertenecer a la sociedad civil.

摘要

本文从四个关键角度对国家状况对民间团体的实力的影响进行了分析:民主水平、政治稳定性、法制以及经济发展。由于现有的研究主要集中在西方和后共产主义时代的国家, 我们在分析中明确把发展中国家包括在内。我们采用团体成员作为衡量团体实力的指标,采集了53个国家的数据。在我们的多层回归模型中,法制、经济发展和(较不重要的因素)政治稳定性是影响民间团体成员的主要因素。 和之前的研究不同,我们指出这种关系是抛物线型而非线性,这说明,当现有的理论预测发展中国家的成员减少时,我们发现这些成员人数增加,换句话说,在成员水平上严峻的状况实际上对民间团体起增强作用。我们认为,由于在发展中国家和发达国家中,影响CSO成员的原因不同,我们说明的可能就是现实状况。和理论假设不同,民主权利似乎对民间团体的成员并不起重要作用。

ملخص

تحلل هذه المقالة تأثير السياق الوطني على قوة المجتمع المدني على أساس أربعة أبعاد رئيسية هي: مستوى الديمقراطية، الإستقرار السياسي، سيادة القانون والتنمية الاقتصادية. في حين أن الدراسات الحالية تركز بشكل رئيسي على الدول الغربية والشيوعية، نحن نشمل صراحة البلدان النامية في تحليلنا. نحن نستخدم عضوية إنتساب كممثل لقوة المجتمع المدني ونشمل بيانات من 53 دولة. سيادة القانون، التنمية الاقتصادية و(بدرجة أقل) الإستقرار السياسي يبرز من نماذج الإنحدارمتعدد المستويات الخاص كعوامل رئيسية تؤثرعلى عضوية المجتمع المدني. على عكس الدراسات السابقة، نحن نبين أن هذه العلاقات تربيعية بدلا” من خطية. هذا يعني أنه حيثما تتوقع النظريات الحالية إنخفاضا” في عضوية في البلدان النامية، نجد ارتفاعا”. بعبارة أخرى، الظروف القاسية فعلا” تقوي المجتمع المدني من حيث مستويات العضوية. نحن نجادل أن هذا يمكن أن يكون هو الحال لأن الأسباب لعضوية منظمات المجتمع المدني (CSO) تختلف أساسا” في البلدان المتقدمة وفي العالم النامي. على عكس الإفتراضات النظرية، لا تظهر الحقوق الديمقراطية في غاية الأهمية لعضوية المجتمع المدني.

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Notes

  1. While the WVS is the only study that provides individual-level data for a wide range of countries, this does however not mean that it is the only civil society measure available. Two other interesting studies are the comparative nonprofit sector project (CNSP) of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Civil Society and CIVICUS’ Civil Society Index (CSI). CNSP started a collaboration with the UN to develop new official procedures for governments around the world to use in collecting data on the nonprofit sector, philanthropy and volunteering. This resulted in the UN Handbook on Nonprofit Institutions which has been implemented by statistical offices of 16 countries. Summarising the resulting data, Salamon et al. (2013) provide a wide array of comparative sector-level data for these countries such as the percentage of the nonprofit sector in the overall workforce of a country, its share in the GDP, the percentage of volunteering, main types of activities of CSOs, etcetera. CIVICUS’ CSI project measures civil society on five dimensions, namely civic engagement, level of organisation, practice of values, perception of impact and external environment. Rather than it being primarily a tool for statistical comparison, it is more a tool for political action, as CIVICUS states: “Because the CSI encourages civil society reflection and self-analysis, it should be acknowledged that the findings tend to be mostly internally focused. They tend to examine what civil society feels it needs to do itself to enhance its capacity and make the best of whatever opportunities may be available to it” (CIVICUS 2011, p. 8).

  2. See http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/for additional information.

  3. These are: (1) social welfare service organisations for elderly, handicapped or deprived people; (2) religious or church organisations; (3) organisations in the area of education, arts, music or cultural activities; (4) labour unions; (5) political parties or groups; (6) local community action groups on issues like poverty, employment, housing, racial equality; (7) organisations that focus on third world development or human rights; (8) organisations that focus on conservation, the environment or animal rights; (9) professional associations; (10) youth work organisations (e.g. scouts, guides, youth clubs, etc.); (11) sports or recreation organisations; (12) women’s groups; (13) the peace movement; (14) voluntary organisation concerned with health; and (15) other groups.

  4. The category ‘other groups’ was also incorporated to include a wide range of CSOs.

  5. Curtis et al. (2001) find that high union membership counts for former eastern bloc nations distort their analysis. They argue that this is the case because union membership is compulsory rather than voluntary in many of these countries. As they use the WVS data from right after the fall of the Berlin wall (1991–1993), the influence of communism was still strong. This reasoning does not apply to our study because we use data from 1999 to 2004.

  6. Because the maximum number of organisational memberships is limited to 14, we used a binomial distribution rather than a poisson distribution to model our dependent variable. The proportion of memberships is linked to the covariates using a logit link function.

  7. Freedom House, Freedom of the World 2002: the annual survey of political rights and civil liberties, available at: http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/freedom-world-2002 [accessed February 2012].

  8. Here we followed Ruiter and De Graaf (2006) and inverted the scale for interpretation purposes. Higher scores indicate a higher level of democracy.

  9. United Nations Development Programme, Human development report 2004: Cultural Liberty in Today’s Diverse World, available at: http://hdr.undp.org/en/reports/global/hdr2004/ [accessed March 2012].

  10. Following Curtis et al. (2001) and Schofer and Fourcade-Gourinchas (2001), we calculate the logarithm of GDP, to prevent extremely rich countries from dominating estimated regression effects.

  11. World Bank, World governance indicators 1996–2005, available at: http://www.worldbank.org/wbi/governance/exelgraphs [accessed February 2012].

  12. In the analysis, the three categories are recoded into dummy variables for materialist values and mixed values that should be interpreted in relation to the reference category of post-materialist values. The expectation is that both dummies will have negative coefficients, and that the materialist category will show a more pronounced negative coefficient than the mixed category.

  13. We applied the xtmelogit procedure with a random intercept for the countries using 7 quadrature points.

  14. We estimated separate models for each of the country-level variables, since these are highly collinear. For example, the square of log(GDP) can be explained for about 80 % by the other three country-level variables and their squares. Including all eight variables in one model would therefore lead to unstable estimates.

  15. We also tested a model with only a linear effect which appeared to be insignificant.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Manfred te Grotenhuis, Marc Morjé Howard, Frans Schuurman and Peer Scheepers for useful comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this article. Also, we would like to thank the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs for funding this research project.

Funding

This study was partly funded by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Civil Society Division, Social Development Department, Ministery of Foreign Affairs, Bezuidenhoutseweg 67, 2594 AC, The Hague, The Netherlands

    Jelmer Kamstra

  2. Department of Cultural Anthropology and Development Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen, P.O. Box 9104, 6500 HE, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Willem Elbers & Ruerd Ruben

  3. Department of Sociology, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Ben Pelzer

  4. African Studies Centre, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Willem Elbers

  5. LEI, University of Wageningen, Wageningen, The Netherlands

    Ruerd Ruben

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  1. Jelmer Kamstra
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Correspondence to Jelmer Kamstra.

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Kamstra, J., Pelzer, B., Elbers, W. et al. Constraining Is Enabling? Exploring the Influence of National Context on Civil Society Strength. Voluntas 27, 1023–1044 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11266-016-9697-0

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