Yevgenya Paturyan

Civil Society and Democracy: Disentangling Mutual Influences Yevgenya Paturyan

Does civil society contribute to democratization? If yes, in what way? The purpose of this book is to add to the existing knowledge on the complex relationship between civil society and democracy. It approaches the problem from an institutional and from a cultural perspective, combining country level and individual level analysis, in trying to understand which of the two influences the other more: civil society or democracy. The book examines the interplay between civil society and democracy utilizing some new measurements of civil society, comparing data from more than 60 countries from all over the world, and using a range of statistical methods: from simple descriptive statistics to hierarchical linear modeling. The book should help gain an overview of various approaches to analyzing civil society and its relation to democracy. It is intended for graduate students in political science and sociology and researchers of civil society. It can also serve as a good example of empirical analysis of two complex inter-related phenomena in social sciences.