This panel provides new answers to controversial questions on the development of civil society in Europe.  The papers by Fernandes and Cornell, Moeller and Skaaning reopen the question of "bad" civil society.  Cornell, Moeller and Skaaning argue that the formative cases for the thesis, taken from the interwar period, are outliers.  Building on their earlier large-n analysis they present casework that demonstrates a vibrant civil society contributed to the stability of democracy in the interwar era.  Fernandes, using the Varieties of Democratization dataset, explores the contours of anti-system movement activity in postwar Southern European democracies.  He argues that democratization creates critical junctures that frame mass and elite understandings of the role of civil society and what that means for anti-system movements (uncivil society).  The papers by Bernhard and Ekiert, Kubik and Wenzel, re-examine the "weakness" of postcommunist civil society.  Using the newly created V-Dem Core Civil Society Index, Bernhard demonstrates that post-communist civil society is not weaker than in other regions.  Ekiert, Kubik, and Wentzel explore the creation of a vibrant post-transitional civil society in Poland and discuss how postcommunist change has affected three forms of inequality -  political, civil, and economic.