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We discuss here the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Civil Society data, a new and unparalleled resource that captures multiple dimensions of civil society across more than 170 states since 1900. The value-added of the V-Dem civil society data is that it encompasses diverse indicators over an unprecedented geographic and temporal scope. This is possible because it has taken a store of detailed and rich human knowledge--the embedded knowledge of country experts--and transformed it into comparable time-series cross-sectional data that facilitates new forms of descriptive and theoretical inference.
Here we make prominent use of three new variables that allow us to gauge civil society strength and participation. However, the larger dataset allows researchers to track a range of new variables for many other aspects of civil society that heretofore, despite their relevance to important theoretical questions, have been difficult to gauge. These include concepts such as the degree to which decision-makers consult with civil society actors, the presence and nature of anti-system movements, state harassment and regulation of civil society organizations, the predominant organizational pattern of civil society organizations, and the degree to which civil society excludes both female and religious actors.1
We begin with a discussion of the importance of civil society as a relatively new concept in comparative politics and the difficulty of testing general propositions about it due to the existing data environment. We then discuss the data generally and highlight two mid-range indices developed by V-Dem: the Core Civil Society Index (CCSI) and the Civil Society Participation Index (CSPI). With these basics established, we then report on a series of validity tests for the CCSI that demonstrate the level of dense historical nuance that the V-Dem data embodies, and then demonstrate the utility of the data by revisiting the debate on the strength of post-communist civil society. The V-Dem data show that civil society in the region exhibits a great deal of variation, that it is neither universally strong nor weak, and that greater caution is warranted in generalizing about civil society in the post-communist region.
The Emergence of Civil Society as a Key Concept in Comparative Politics
Civil society has been an important concept in both political theory and the study of regimes and regime change in modern political...