When some members of yesterday’s opposition organizations enter the state upon democratic breakthrough, does this empower or weaken the mission of the organizations left behind? While little research has been directed at this important element of democratization, I leverage the existing interdisciplinary social movement literature to create a series of forward-reaching arguments, based on identities, networks and opportunity structures. In the context of current studies, each of these factors should provide advantage to organizations with colleagues now in the state. By contrast, I argue that identities and personal networks developed during the struggle provide movement activists with opportunities to influence minor issues, but that new and differing institutional pressures create schisms on broader policy that turn prior bonds into a liability rather than an asset. I use elite interviews and media analyses in the case of post-democratic breakthrough Poland to evaluate three competing arguments, focused on identities, networks and institutions.

While there is significant anecdotal evidence that excluded political opposition parties in repressive states adopt the form of human rights organizations, there is little systematic research into this phenomenon. What does exist tends to be descriptive rather than theoretical in nature. This paper draws from collective action and resource mobilization literatures, arguing that excluded political elites respond to repression by searching for political opportunities both domestically and internationally, and then transform their organizations into units better able to take advantage of those opportunities. The politics of external funding push these organizations towards a human rights and democratization orientation. The article evaluates this argument through an analysis of human rights movements in politically repressive, post-Communist Uzbekistan and considers the impact of this phenomenon on democratization and civil society development.

According to scholars of resource dependency, foreign funding can weaken rather than strengthen civil society abroad, ultimately impeding its effectiveness. Yet the spate of recent “democratic revolutions” in semiauthoritarian, postcommunist states suggests that pumping foreign money into the nongovernmental sphere can be an effective strategy. In this paper Brian Grodsky argues that a critical factor in assessing the likelihood that a given organizational movement will succumb to the ills of resource dependency is the type of politicization within that movement. Those organizations composed of members primarily motivated by ideology are logically less likely to succumb to resource dependency than those organizations dominated by political aspirants intent on converting democratization into their own political power. Two case studies, communist-era Poland and contemporary Uzbekistan, provide support for this theory.