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Weak states, weak societies: Europe's east-west gap

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Abstract

The transfer of rules, such as in the European Union's recent enlargements, requires well-functioning institutions of government as well as societal actors ready to engage with the new rules. Officials of the European Commission and other practitioners highlighted the need for both in the run-up to enlargement, whereas critics of the 2004 and 2007 rounds have faulted the state-centric approach employed by the EU for undercutting societal actors in the new member states. This article examines data from the World Values Survey and World Bank Governance Indicators and shows that state capacity and organized interests do indeed go hand in hand: Among the 27 EU member states, countries that score high on good governance also have citizens engaged in interest organizations, volunteering for a broad variety of causes and ready to participate in acts of protest. By the same token, in countries where governments struggle to deliver results, organized interests are insufficiently established and rarely in a position to perform governance functions. The data show systematic and statistically significant differences between old and new member states, with Eastern Europe lagging behind most of the older democracies on both dimensions, that is, state capacity and civil society. Considerable variation within each block does not negate this basic gap, though it highlights the need for nuance and cautions against determinism. The article seeks to set the stage for the case studies contained in this special issue.

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Notes

  1. Examples that come to mind are Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth.

  2. It is useful in this discussion to distinguish civil and political society. Linz and Stepan define civil society as ‘that arena of the polity where self-organizing groups, movements, and individuals, relatively autonomous from the state, attempt to articulate values, create associations and solidarities, and advance their interests’ (1996, p. 7). By contrast, political society consists of ‘the core institutions … by which society constitutes itself politically to select and monitor democratic government’, specifically ‘political parties, elections, electoral rules, political leadership, interparty alliances, and legislatures’ (1996, p. 8).

  3. For studies of the Union's influence specifically on Eastern Europe, see Andonova (2004), Jacoby (2004), Albi (2005), Kelley (2006), Haughton (2007), Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier (2005), Sissenich (2007).

  4. See Weiss (1998). Nobody doubts the war-making capacity of, say, the United States, but military prowess does not automatically translate into a heightened ability to create and implement effective public health or environmental policies.

  5. Two-tailed test, statistically significant at least at the 0.01 level.

  6. The European Social Survey prompts for similar political activities as the WVS, but is not exactly interchangeable in its questions. On seven indicators of political participation (working for a party, working for a non-party organization, wearing a political badge, boycotting a product, contacting a politician and participating in a legal demonstration), CEEC10 scores are significantly lower than EU15 scores throughout three rounds of interviewing (2002, 2004, 2006).

  7. All coefficients are statistically significant at the 0.01 level (two-tailed test).

  8. At the 0.05 level (two-tailed test).

  9. The correlation coefficient between political stability and volunteer work is 0.44 (significant at the 0.05 level).

  10. The coefficients range between 0.59 (regulatory quality) and 0.67 (government effectiveness) and are all significant at the 0.01 level.

  11. But note that the standard measures for ‘social capital’, that is, associational membership and various forms of trust toward individuals and institutions (used, for instance, in European cross-country studies by Pichler and Wallace, 2007; Adam, 2008; Jones et al, 2008; Kaasa and Parts, 2008) do not entirely capture the political involvement of citizens that interests me here, hence my reliance on protest participation rather than trust.

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Sissenich, B. Weak states, weak societies: Europe's east-west gap. Acta Polit 45, 11–40 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1057/ap.2009.28

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