Clubs and associations build democracy, except when they help dismantle it
Robert Putnam argued that bowling leagues, choirs and charities knit the trust democracies run on. Weimar Germany is the awkward counterexample. Its crowded web of grievance-driven associations gave the Nazis a ready-made network, helping a party with 2.63 per cent of the vote in 1928 become the largest in the Reichstag by 1932.
Civil society usually means the third sector: the organisations and people who act independently of both the state and business. Some writers use it more broadly for the ingredients of a democratic order, such as free speech and independent courts. The idea is old. Aristotle described the political community of the city-state as existing for collective survival and human flourishing, and Leonardo Bruni's late medieval Latin translation turned his phrase into societas civilis. In the late 20th century, Eastern European dissidents such as Václav Havel used the term for the space of free association that communist regimes tried to swallow.
The modern theory draws on the Scottish Enlightenment, notably Adam Ferguson, and on Hegel, whose ideas passed to Tocqueville and Marx. Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba later argued that membership in organisations produces better-informed citizens who vote thoughtfully and hold governments to account. Group rulebooks were even described as micro-constitutions, since they train members in formal democratic procedure. Putnam went further: even non-political groups build social capital, the networks and habits of reciprocity that let people solve collective problems, and his research in Italy found members showed more trust and participation.
Critics push back. Thomas Carothers notes that associations do not necessarily form for good reasons or spread democratic values. Sheri Berman's work on Weimar shows how groups that deepened divisions among Germans became vulnerable to nationalism and were infiltrated by the Nazis. Kenneth Newton's survey data found little overlap between social trust and political trust, and a swarm of special-interest lobbies can tilt policy toward the well organised.
In the United States, Tocqueville credited the habit of forming associations for the country's democratic success. Theda Skocpol's research adds a caveat: the shift from big membership bodies such as unions toward small single-issue movements makes mass participation less likely. David Rieff warns that such activism can shrink elections down to a few hot-button topics.
Source: Civil society
