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The literature on civil society in post-communist contexts highlights its weakness compared to other democracies. In this paper we verify that this is true and then study whether the legacy of dictatorship is more generally associated with the emergence of civil society across a range of democracies. We examine the slow emergence of two behaviors that associated with a robust civil society ? participation in organizational life and in protest ? and explain variation across societies as a function of their regime history. We draw our individual level data largely from the World Values Survey (2000) and analyze the behavior of over 39,000 citizens from forty-two democracies. Using methods of hierarchical linear modeling to control for both national and individual variation across antecedent regime types, we find that certain patterns of dictatorship have powerful negative legacies for the establishment of a democratic civil society, while others pose less of a barrier. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]