Civil Society and Democracy under Pressure: Does Authoritarian Mobilization and Party Incapacity Diminish the Positive Effect of Civil Society?

Abstract

ABSTRACT Countries worldwide are experiencing a sharp wave of democratic decline that is cutting away at the gains made toward democracy that had occurred in decades prior. While the majority of scholars demonstrate a robust positive association between civil society and democracy, historical case studies in political sociology have demonstrated that nations with robust civic spheres can become cauldrons of anti-democratic politics under particular circumstances, particularly when the country has weak and ineffective political parties and when the country has autocratic movements working to degrade the democracy. While these case studies illuminate important caveats to leading research on civil society, these findings have not been tested at a cross-national level. In this paper, we ask how weak political parties and autocratic mobilization moderate the extent to which countries with more civic participation have stronger democracies around the world. We examine this research question using the continuous level of electoral democracy. Findings of our statistical analysis reveal support for the conditioning effects of weak political parties and autocratic mobilization on the relationship between civil society and electoral democracy and stability.