Tuesday, June 25, 2013
C0.17 (Oudemanhuispoort)
On the basis of an empirical analysis of the sharply divergent – but historically proximate – cases of Portugal and Spain I offer two broad theoretical generalizations about how civil society matters in democratization: 1) The place of civil society in regime transition and the broader nature of democratization pathways are mutually constitutive, developing in a dynamic and iterative series of interactions. In this dynamic process crucial features of civil society organization and practice take on new forms shaped by features of the transition pathway, just as they also contribute to defining crucial features of the broader process of transition. 2) The form taken by civil society in democratic transition and its place in the broader process of democratization carries large and enduring consequences for the type of democratic practice that predominates after transition. Thus I argue that civil society matters at least as much for the nature of democratic practice after the transition as for the trajectory followed by regime transition itself. Although the empirical discussion is heavily focused on the paired comparison of Portugal and Spain, the paper also makes use of empirical material from other country cases to support the argument.
