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Mass mobilization (MM) is an important driver of political change. While some citizens organize in favor of more democratic institutions, others take to the streets to support an authoritarian status quo. This article introduces measures of pro-democratic and pro-autocratic MM using expert assessments for 179 polities from 1900–2021. The data allow us to trace patterns in MM over time, across regions and regime types. We use this new data to systematically analyze the relationship between both types of mobilization and regime change. We confirm the findings of the literature on contentious democratic politics, and our analysis of autocratic mobilization allows us to make sense of the controversy in the literature on "bad actors" in civil society. We show that MM in favor of autocracy negatively affects democracy, making a case for specifying the goals of the actors involved in contentious politics to more precisely understand their impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We theorize that three distinct structures of democratic constraint explain why more democratic dyads do not engage in military conflict with each other. We build on earlier theories that focused on electoral and horizontal accountability. We add a new dimension—the social accountability provided by an active civil society. Using several new measures from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) data set, we stringently test these explanations. We find social accountability to be the strongest and most consistent predictor of nonbelligerence in dyads, that horizontal accountability is still important, but that the independent role of electoral accountability has been somewhat overstated. However, we do find that social and electoral accountability work strongly together, to make for an even greater effect. The finding is robust to a range of specifications and in the face of controls for contending theories that challenge the democratic peace (e.g., the capitalist and territorial peace theories). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We show how the V-Dem data opens new possibilities for studying civil society in comparative politics. We explain how V-Dem was able to extract embedded expert knowledge to create a novel set of civil society indicators for 173 countries from 1900 to the present. This data overcomes shortcomings in the basis on which inference has been made about civil society in the past by avoiding problems of sample bias that make generalization difficult or tentative. We begin with a discussion of the reemergence of civil society as a central concept in comparative politics. We then turn to the shortcomings of the existing data and discusses how the V-Dem data can overcome them. We introduce the new data, highlighting two new indices—the core civil society index (CCSI) and the civil society participation index (CSPI)—and explain how the individual indicators and the indices were created. We then demonstrate how the CCSI uses embedded expert knowledge to capture the development of civil society on the national level in Venezuela, Ghana, and Russia. We close by using the new indices to examine the dispute over whether post-communist civil society is “weak.” Time-series cross-sectional analysis using 2,999 country-year observations between 1989 and 2012 fails to find that post-communist civil society is substantially different from other regions, but that there are major differences between the post-Soviet subsample and other post-communist countries both in relation to other regions and each other. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including income disparity in new democracies in Europe, inequality in Poland after 1989, and civil socities in autocratic regimes.

This article argues that the strength of civil society at the point of extrication from communism is a powerful predictor of how “liberal democratic” post-communist regimes become. This is based on the impact that an engaged civil society has on the reconfiguration of post-communist elites and the degree to which the model of accumulation permits concentrat on of resources in the hands of previous elites. In cases where civil society was engaged a: the moment of extrication, the elite were disposed to a more liberal model of capitalism which afforded greater social welfare protection. Where civil society was weaker, the elite were able to convert political power into concentrated control of economic assets and a more predatory and inegalitarian model of political capitalism emerged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reconsiders the work of Barrington Moore and his critics on the historical emergence of democracy in the light of post-communist democratization. What are we to make of a region which violates Moore's dictum – “No bourgeoisie, no democracy”? Using the tools of comparative historical analysis, it makes sense of how democracy emerged in the region by developing a theory which both explains why this was possible and what social actors were essential to this outcome. With attention to patterns of social development in the region, the politics of elite alliance in the final phase of communism, the strength of civil society at extrication, and the role of the international system, it explains differences in regime outcomes across the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that Eastern Europe continues to be defined and redefined not just by the actual patterns of socio-economic and political reproduction of the distant and proximate regimes governing the region but also through the perceptions of such legacies as generating fundamental similarities. Such perceived similarities, whether or not closely mapped on the objective parallels among countries in Eastern Europe, facilitate intra-region diffusion that results in (further) spatio-temporal socio-economic and political similarities specific to the region. To illustrate this relationship between precommunist and communist legacies, intra-region diffusion, and the production of Eastern Europe, the article examines Slovakia’s diffusion entrepreneurship in the wave of electoral breakthroughs in Eastern Europe in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This article contributes to the literatures on Eastern Europe and comparative democratization in two main ways. First, it adds to the work on the impact of spatio-temporal dependence on transition outcomes, such as democratization, in Eastern Europe. Second, by doing so, the article also documents the impact of an understudied set of democracy promoters—the Eastern European countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay addresses two controversies on the relationship between civil society and democratization in post-communist countries. It contradicts a tendency to dismiss civil society as a myth, ideology, or framing device for social movements and instead demonstrates that civil society is a real material force that has played a critical role in democratic breakthroughs in the region. It also criticizes the tendency to characterize post-communist civil society as either strong or weak in a blanket fashion. Instead, it shows that looking at differences in the strength of civil society at moments of transition is a good indicator of how durable that transition will be. This is illustrated with empirical work on both the breakthrough years of 1989-1991 and the period of the color revolutions in the 2000s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines what has happened to civil society in Poland and other post-communist states since the collapse of communist states. Four factors in the weakening of civil society; Demobilization of insurgent civil society; Decapitation through success; Post-totalitarianism; Social transformation.