INTRODUCTION

Having defined and described the concept of civil society and justified the need to measure it comparatively, I now present and analyze recent empirical evidence that includes a wide set of countries from around the world. Although civil society is only one of many important challenges facing post-communist societies – and one should therefore be cautious in extending these results and findings to other issues – it does provide us with a baseline from which to measure and compare types of democracy across societies. Again, as emphasized in the previous chapter, while a vibrant civil society in itself is no guarantee of democratic survival, citizen involvement and participation do represent an essential component of the quality of democracy.

The main goal of this chapter is to present this empirical baseline – a consistent and comparative measure of membership in voluntary organizations from a wide range of countries and regions – and to analyze the possible causes of differing levels of organizational membership across countries. Overall, the findings of this chapter point to consistently and systematically low levels of membership throughout the countries of post-communist Europe, when compared to the levels in many other countries from outside the region. After characterizing and analyzing the particular weakness of post-communist civil society in this chapter, the following two chapters apply individual-level analysis – using both a representative survey and in-depth interviews – in order to account for this striking finding.