Explaining the Origins of Uncivil Civil Society: Southern Europe, 1960s-2000s

This paper uses the Varieties of Democracy database in order to understand variations in the presence of anti-system civil society movements in contemporary Southern European democracies (France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain). Against much of the literature, it finds that these are unrelated to past and contemporary levels of density of civil society, degrees of freedom of association and state repression, political parties’ institutionalization levels and linkages with civil society, and past presence of anti-system movements. Instead, this paper argues that long-run mass and elite cultural understandings of the role of civil society organizations in politics reasserted themselves in the critical junctures of democratization of the late 1960s and early 1970s, thus contributing to shaping contemporary patterns of uncivil civil society.