Against de Tocqueville: How Membership in Civil Society Organizations Predicts Understandings of Democracy

• In Event: Civil society and democracy

Abstract

The literature on the relationship between people’s understanding of democracy and their political participation is well-established. Accordingly, how people understand democracy has an impact on the form and frequency of their political participation (Bengtsson and Christensen, 2014; Canache, 2012; Cinar and Bulbul, 2021; Galais and Blais, 2016). Research on the determinants of CSO membership is also rich (Paxton et al., 2007; Wallace and Pichler, 2009). However, despite a rich literature that demonstrates the positive relationship between democracy and CSOs (Tocqueville, 1988; Paxton, 2002), to our knowledge, research on how people’s understanding of democracy affects their membership of CSOs is scarce.

Drawing on the classification made by Norris (2011), this paper explores whether CSO membership is associated with people’s understanding of democracy. According to this classification, there are three understandings of democracy: (1) a procedural understanding, associated with the institutions and principles of liberal democracy such as the rule of law and freedoms; (2) a redistributive understanding, associated with the quality of governance, such as economic prosperity and delivery of goods and services; (3) an authoritarian understanding, associated with the support for the military and religious authorities’ intervention in democratic processes (Norris, 2011). We hypothesize that individuals with a procedural and redistributive understandings of democracy are more likely to act for further democratization in certain areas and therefore join CSOs through which they can express themselves and make demands on the state on the relevant issues, while those with an authoritarian understanding of democracy are less likely to join CSOs.

We tested our hypotheses using data from the seventh wave of the World Values Survey (2017-2022), which has nine questions about understandings of democracy. Factor analysis indicated that the nine questions loaded onto three factors corresponding to procedural, redistributive, and authoritarian understandings. The WVS asks respondents whether they are members of eleven types of civil society organizations. We used multilevel logistic regression to see whether membership in each type of CSO was predicted by the three understandings of democracy, including controls at both the individual and country levels. Our analytical sample included over 77,000 individuals in 64 countries.

Against our predictions, we found that a procedural understanding of democracy was associated negatively with being a member in a CSO across all 11 types, while an authoritarian understanding of democracy was positively associated with being a member of all types of CSOs. A redistributive understanding of democracy had a positive association with membership in some CSOs and a negative relationship with membership in others.

Our findings challenge long-held assumptions about the relationship between conceptions of democracy and CSO membership. More research, particularly qualitative research within individual countries, is needed to explore the reasons for this association. The practical contribution is for practitioners to rethink the relationship between CSO membership and democracy, and not to assume that this relationship is always positive.

References

Bengtsson, Å, & Christensen, H. (2016). Ideals and actions: Do citizens’ patterns of political participation correspond to their conceptions of democracy? Government and Opposition, 51(2),
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Authors

• Sema Akboga, Istanbul Medipol University

• Christopher Einolf, Northern Illinois University