Tuesday, June 25, 2013
C0.17 (Oudemanhuispoort)
We argue that the thesis on the weakness of civil society after the fall of state socialism is overstated, at least in the case of Poland. The methodology is inductive and multi-method, and designed to capture actions in addition to declarations of participation. Our extensive, multi-source data collection was based on four premises. First, our conclusions are based on a database that is more extensive (20 years), multi-dimesional, and fine-grained than in other studies. Second, we employ a diachronic perspective to avoid generalizations based on a limited set of observations of static situations. Third, we reassess the impact of authoritarian legacies on the post-transitional development (we argue that the broadly accepted generalization portraying civil society under communism as non-existent, inconsequential or barren is overstated). Fourth, we place contentious politics, an area of civil society activity often absent from standard studies of the topic, at the center of our analysis. Analyses are both quantitative and qualitative.
