INTRODUCTION

Only twenty years ago “civil society” was an arcane concept in political theory. Today it is a term that floods academic, journalistic, and even everyday discourse. The concept of civil society was revitalized in the 1980s by the Polish opposition movement and the subsequent wave of democratization around the world. Since then, civil society as an object of study has experienced a veritable explosion, and today it is commonly applied to very different contexts throughout the world. In the new post–Cold War era, in which many countries have embarked on various forms of democratization, civil society has come to be seen as one of the main indicators of that process. Moreover, almost every large international foundation or institute has established some kind of “civil society initiative” for the purpose of monitoring and strengthening civil society in countries across the globe, and especially in post-communist Europe.

A vibrant civil society is often seen as the key ingredient in the success of advanced democracies in the West, as well as a panacea for developing countries elsewhere in the world. Within political science – even though trust, political participation, and democratization have been standard themes in comparative politics for decades – civil society has become a “new” way of framing such research, with applications throughout the Western and non-Western world.

This chapter presents my conception and application of civil society within the field of comparative politics.