Abstract
This article introduces the six contributions included in the special issue of the Journal of Civil Society devoted to the results of the CINEFOGO (Civil Society and New Forms of Governance in Europe) Network of Excellence's work package on ‘Differences in Social Participation and Civic Cultures across Europe’, organized by the Research Institute for Nonprofit Organizations at the WU Wien (Vienna University of Economics and Business).
Keywords:
Europe is characterized by diversity and heterogeneity. Though this is platitudinous, it is also true for the European civil society. There are remarkable differences between Anglo-Saxon, Romance, Slavic, Nordic, and Germanic civic cultures. And there are still areas of the civil society landscape which cannot even be assigned to these clusters.
Nevertheless specific patterns emerge from large-scale survey research. Most obviously, in civic participation there is a slope from the North-West to the South-East. In its traditional forms, i.e. membership, volunteering, donating, and political engagement, the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands are top ranked, followed by Central European countries, whereas Southern and Eastern European Countries drop behind. Historical developments which influenced the role of families, clans, the weight of and the trust in the state, business organizations and civil society explain many of these imbalances. The rather modest explanatory power of multilevel models also suggests that there are important factors which cannot be or are not yet revealed by survey methods.
Therefore, it is still ambitious to speak about European civil society and participation. Furthermore, the articles in this special issue of the Journal of Civil Society highlight only some aspects of a multilayered picture, partly providing a rough impression of differences and similarities across Europe, partly presenting a more detailed insight in selected national civil societies or specific aspects of citizens’ participation.
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Lesley Hustinx and Thomas Denk start with conceptual and methodological considerations about participation research. After a thorough and compelling review of the state-of-the-art, they fundamentally criticize survey-based research, as it has not yet illuminated the black box of participation, and it has not yet unlocked the multidimensionality of participation from its prison of one-dimensional empirical measures.
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Though also based on existing survey-based measures, Tom van der Meer, Manfred te Grotenhuis and Peer Scheepers shed light into this black box by distinguishing between different types of associations. They depart from a homogenous understanding of social participation and develop three types of voluntary organizations: leisure organizations which fulfil recreational purposes, interest organizations which aim to represent the interest of their members, and activist organizations which advocate broad societal interests. They further stress the relevance of this typology by demonstrating that cross-culturally the involvement rates and the share of volunteers differ significantly: European civil societies can be categorized according to the relevance of leisure, interest, and activist organizations.
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It is the rather ‘conventional’ set of actions which the next article deals with: Membership in (non-political) civil society organizations (CSOs) and political engagement. Also based on European Social Survey data from 2002, Stefanie Mackerle-Bixa, Michael Meyer and Guido Strunk ask the question whether membership is positively or negatively related with political engagement, thus tracing the school-of-democracy hypothesis. They compare the causal structure of these two forms of participation through multi-level modelling and reveal that membership relies on a rather stable set of variables which explain various forms of engagement quite well, whereas political engagement cannot be explained properly even by numerous variables on the individual and macro level.
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Martti Siisiäinen and Raimo Blom present associational activeness and attitudes towards political citizenship in Finland as an example to emphasize state- and polity-regimes and state-civil society relations as causal factors to explain cross-cultural differences. Hereby they especially highlight the importance of thorough historical analysis. Finland is one of the European countries with low statism and high corporateness. This leads to a strong role of CSOs and a high degree of trust in them, whereas political participation is rather minimal.
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Unlike in Finland and in the Scandinavian countries, where education and socioeconomic status play a minor role in explaining differences in participation, social inequality is mirrored in the civil societies of most other European countries. Karin Heitzmann, Johanna Hofbauer, Stefanie Mackerle-Bixa and Guido Strunk refer to Pierre Bourdieu's concept of capitals and Putnam's theory of social capital and trust to explain whether or not citizens participate. Empirically, two indicators are revealed as most important for individual differences in Austria: citizenship values and social networks/activities.
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Kristin Str⊘msnes presents Norwegian data to analyse political consumerism as a new and unconventional form of participation. It is revealed, however, that it is less an alternative form and rather an extension of conventional political engagement. Looking at the social characteristics of political consumers there is no evidence that these citizens are politically marginalized with no other form of engagement available; on the contrary, those who participate conventionally also apply political consumerism, i.e., the well-educated, politically active citizens.
The articles presented here are mainly the result of cooperation and exchange between researchers of many European countries which started in 2005. The initiator was the CINEFOGO (Civil Society and New Forms of Governance in Europe) Network of Excellence, which was funded by the EU within the 6th Framework Programme. Its main objective was to link researchers in the fields of civil society and new forms of governance. Forty-three institutions with more than 200 researchers were integrated in this network which worked until 2009. This network offered a unique possibility for many of us to exchange our ideas, concepts and findings with colleagues across Europe.
CINEFOGO is focusing on the importance of improving citizens' participation in governance. This requires new knowledge on the importance of social and cultural diversity, active citizenship, civic participation and organized civil society, all issues that have become more pressing with the on-going enlargement of Europe—a Europe characterized by growing inequality in economic and social conditions of the citizens but also increased diversity in the perception of how to proceed in the process of economic, social and political integration of the European nation-states.
Specifically, it was Work Package 11 (WP11) ‘Differences in Social Participation and Civic Cultures across Europe’, organized by the Research Institute for Nonprofit Organizations at the WU Wien (Vienna University of Economics and Business) which provided a platform for discussion and seeded many of the ideas which are collected in this issue. We tried to compare different modes of civic participation between countries, investigate conditions of engagement on an individual as well as on a macro level, and explain national distinctions in the extent of citizens' involvement. Furthermore, we started a methodological discussion which will hopefully be fruitful in the future. During CINEFOGO WP11, we were not considerate of researchers' convenience and met at places like Plovdiv, Bulgaria, in foggy December 2006, Vienna, Austria, in sunny September 2007 and rainy April 2008, and The Hague and Scheveningen in windy January 2009. Thanks to the many colleagues who joined us and contributed.
There are a number of colleagues which deserve to be honoured explicitly: Thomas Boje who was the founder and driving force behind the CINEFOGO network and did an unbelievable job in keeping 50 work packages together without ever losing his optimism and sense of humour; Paul Dekker, Tom van der Meer and Eric van Ingen not only for organizing the workshop in The Hague and Scheveningen, but also for substantially contributing to and levelling up our discussions; Siyka Kovacheva for inviting us to Plovdiv and being a perfectly supporting partner throughout WP 11; Stefanie Mackerle-Bixa and Paul Rameder for organizing WP 11 from its Vienna homebase.
Last not least many thanks to Helmut Anheier and the anonymous reviewers of the Journal of Civil Society for their constructive advice and support to finalize the contributions to this issue.