The Varieties of Democracy Core Civil Society Index

Abstract

Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) is a new approach to the conceptualization and measurement of democracy. It is co-hosted by the University of Gothenburg and University of Notre Dame. With a V-Dem Institute at University of Gothenburg that comprises almost ten staff members, and a project team across the world with four Principal Investigators, fifteen Project Managers, 30+ Regional Managers, 170 Country Coordinators, Research Assistants, and 2,500 Country Experts, the V-Dem project is one of the largest-ever social science research-oriented data collection programs.Please address comments and/or queries for information to: AbstractThis paper introduces the Core Civil Society Index (CCSI), a measure of the robustness of civil society, using indicators from the Varieties of Democracy battery on civil society. It begins with a discussion of the reemergence of civil society as a central concept in comparative politics and discusses the existing state of data to capture it. It then discusses the conceptualization behind the CCSI and the construction of the measure. This is followed by a series of face and discriminant validity checks. The paper closes with an example of the CCSI's utility by examining the question of whether postcommunist civil society is "weak" compared to other regions. We find no evidence that postcommunist civil society is less robust than civil society in other major world regions via time-series cross-sectional analysis using 2999 country-year observations between 1989 and 2012.3

Determinants of Equitable Social Policy in Latin America (1990–2013)

“…Civil society entry and exit ( v2cseeorgs ), an indicator that assesses to what extent the government exerts control over entry and exit by CSO into public life. We follow Bernhard et al (2015: 7), who argue that “civil society organizations include, but are by no means limited to, interest groups, labor unions, spiritual organizations (if they are engaged in civic or political activities), social movements, professional associations, charities, and other non-governmental organizations.” Figure 4 below shows civil society strength index we built for each Latin American country.…”

The Effect of Civil Society Organizations and Democratization Aid on Civil War Onset

“…This measure is particularly appealing for our analysis; it captures not only how active, organized, and representative civil society is but also the quality of the regime's relationship and accountability to CSOs. Its components speak to civic engagement by the broader population plus the ways states constrain civil society in terms of physical repression as well as laws regulating the formation and participation of CSOs-dynamics at the very heart of our theoretical argument as to why these groups would be skeptical of democratization promises from the state (Bernhard et al 2015).…”

Charismatic authority and fractured polities: A cross‐national analysis

“…In addition, we control for the robustness of the civil society participation in a nation using V‐Dem's Civil Society Participation Index . This measure attends to the level of robustness of civil society participation where high scores correspond to civil society configurations where organizations are autonomous from the state and where individuals freely participate in a variety of organizations to pursue their political goals (Coppedge et al., 2020, p. 287; Bernhard et al., 2015). Nations with robust civil society participation should experience higher levels of trust and stronger democratic institutions that may impede political polarization (Paxton, 2002; Putnam et al., 1994) and instill greater civic discourse (Stryker, 2011).…”