Contextualizing Civic Engagement: The Dynamics of Civil Society Organizations and States

This paper develops a contextualized approach to studying civic engagement focusing on civil society organizations (CSOs) and their interactions with states. Existing research documents how civic engagement may create both a ‘bright’ and ‘dark’ side of social capital with differential effects on democracy and development. However, the mechanisms underlying these effects and the contextual effects within different macro-level politic structures have not been sufficiently studied in an integrated comparative fashion. Research on the frequency and density of civic engagement tends to downplay the qualitative differences in the kind of networks and normative orientations underlying civic engagement. Likewise, comparative scholars have not systematically explored the different impacts of civic engagement in contexts beyond liberal democratic countries.

To overcome these limitations, we develop a theoretical framework for comparative analysis that locates different types of CSO engagement in different state contexts. Underyling our framework is the distinction between the network dimension of engagement, and its normative dimension. Based on whether CSOs use weak vs. strong network ties and inclusive vs. exclusive norms, we propose a typology of civic engagement: universalist, communitarian, particularist, and populist. Likewise, states develop liberal vs. co-optive networks with CSOs and follow democratic vs. autocratic norms, leading to four types of state responses: pluralist, corporatist, state-dominated, and containment. Our conceptual framework situates different kinds of CSOs in different state contexts, thereby moving beyond the "bright" and "dark" sides of civic engagement. In addition, our configurational analysis conceptualizes the alignment and conflicts between CSOs and state actors, and argues that this framework be used to develop deeper theoretical understanding of state-society relations in both the Global North and Global South.