Vad innebär civilsamhället för demokratisering?

Ett levande civilsamhälle är gynnsamt för demokratin, det är nog allmängods idag, efter inflytelserika argument inte minst av Robert Putnams i hans klassiska studie av socialt kapital från 1993. Jag har själv funderat på detta i samband med Sverige i sent 1800-tal, som jag menar utmärktes av en kombination av starkt oligarkiska politiska institutioner, men ett livaktigt politiskt civilsamhälle utanför den officiella politiken. Därför blir jag också extra intresserad när jag hittar en artikel av statsvetaren Omar G. Encarnación som vill komplicera bilden och betona vikten också av de formella politiska institutionerna. Så här sammanfattar han sitt argument, baserat på en fallstudie av Spaniens demokratisering, i början av sin artikel:

"The first is that civil society, however vibrant and robust, does not supercede other conditions necessary for democratic consolidation, including political institutionalization. The second is that the principal reason why the role of civil society in the consolidation of democracy has been inflated is because we have misplaced or misunderstood how civil society actually impacts the process of democratic consolidation. Thus far, much of the debate about the importance of a strong civil society to democracy has focused on the capacity of civil society organizations (be it a trade union, a bird watching club, or a choral society) to generate social capital, understood as generalized trust among the citizenry. This commodity is thought to help eradicate authoritarian tendencies within both the state and society while greasing the societal collaboration that makes democracy possible. I argue that this view of the production of social capital is quite impoverished and that it needs to be expanded by incorporating the performance and legacies of political institutions. The third and final assumption is that most of the virtues ascribed to civil society-especially the engendering of democratic values-can only be realized in the context of a political system that is active in the production of the attributes that we have come to associate with social capital, including a generalized sense of trust among the citizenry but also cross-class collaboration and general interdependence across civil society organizations and political institutions. In other words, a political system endowed with capable and legitimate institutions with deep roots in civil society is necessary. Taken together, these arguments suggest that what matters most about the configuration of civil society in the consolidation of democracy is not the vibrancy and robustness of its various components but rather the effectiveness of the institutional-political frame- work that surrounds them."

Referens
Omar G. Encarnación (2001) "Civil Society and the Consolidation of Democracy in Spain", Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 116, No. 1, pp. 53-79