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Abstract
Citizens' engagement in civil society appears in various forms. Membership in civil society organizations and political engagement have been analytically identified as two major forms, among other forms such as volunteering, donating money, and informal participation, based on European Social Survey data from 2002. In this paper, we analyse the relationship between formal membership and political engagement. Does formal membership contribute positively or negatively to political engagement? Is there more evidence for the assumption of complementarity (‘school of democracy’) or substitution (‘hideaway of Biedermeier’)? Due to a lack of panel data, we compare two multi-level models for (1) membership and (2) political engagement, analysing the explanatory structure of the independent variables. Beyond these differences, model (1) explains real world political engagement better than model (2), revealing that membership relies on a rather stable set of variables explaining various forms of engagement, whereas political engagement cannot be explained properly even by numerous variables on individual and national level.