Strengthening democracy and increasing political participation in Liberia: Does civil society density matter?

ABSTRACT

One way civil society strengthens democracy is by facilitating political participation. Established literature, for example, demonstrates that individuals with greater associational involvement are more likely to engage in politics. There is growing critique of this micro-level focus, however, and increasing acknowledgment that civil society impacts political participation not just at the individual level, but also at the organizational and structural level. This study helps address this critique by assessing whether civil society density, a structural-level characteristic, impacts political participation in Liberia. Using Round 6 Afrobarometer data, combined with a county-level civil society density measure, I test the relationship between civil society density and six forms of political participation, including conventional forms of participation such as voting, communing, and contacting, and unconventional forms such as participation in demonstrations/protests. How does civil society density influence these various forms of political participation? Does civil society density stimulate or inhibit conventional forms of activity such as voting? How about less conventional forms, such as demonstration/protest? Findings suggest higher civil society density in Liberia reduces a citizen’s propensity towards some forms of participation, including contacting a government official, contacting the media, refusing to pay taxes and fees, and participating in demonstrations and protests.

KEYWORDS:

• Civil society
• political participation
• civic engagement
• civil society density
• Nonprofit density
• Liberia

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Approximately 1.4 million people live in the urban capital of Monrovia, and one-third of the country’s total population lives within 80 kilometers of the capital.

2 Technically, Liberia’s First Civil War spanned from 1989 to 1996, after which Taylor was elected president in an election that was not regarded as free and fair. Post-election, the country spiraled into the Second Civil War from 1999 to 2003.

3 Hern (2019) examines conventional (voting, communing and contacting) forms of participation, as well as unconventional participation (protest/demonstration, refusing to pay taxes/fees). In particular, she classifies refusing to pay taxes/fees as a “subversive political behaviour.”

4 Because the 2012 Liberian CSO Directory lists only registered CSOs (versus informal, unregistered CSOs), it may be biased towards formal organizations. However, utilizing data on registered organizations mirrors data from other country contexts, for example the US, in which we use data from registered 501©3 organizations. The 2012 CSO Directory is currently the only data source that documents registered CSOs in Liberia by county.

5 The civil society density variable is an individual-level measure that is attached to each respondent, as the density score is based on a measure for each respondent’s county of residence. In addition, there is a burgeoning literature (Abadie et al., 2017; Angrist & Pischke, 2008; Bester et al., 2011) that indicates using clustered standard errors when there are few clusters (under 50) can lead to standard errors that are unnecessarily large and over-conservative. In this study, there are less than 50 clusters (there are only 15). For these reasons, I do not employ robust clustered standard errors.