The role of civil society in democratization processes

What do the Velvet revolution, the transitions in Baltic countries in the 1990s and the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul have in common? Prof. Donatella Della Porta is leading an ambitious project to compare the most relevant democratization processes led by social movements of the last 25 years.

Civil society studies have lately gained a lot of momentum. Prof. Della Porta is particularly interested in analysing the role of civil society organizations in the recent democratization processes across Europe and its neighbouring countries. Her research team has carried out a comparative analysis of a wide variety of cases, ranging from social movements that broke under authoritarian regimes, such as the transitions in the former USSR and in ex-Yugoslavia in the 1990, to those developed during progressive democracy consolidation stages, such as the 2011 Egyptian revolution in the midst of the Arab Spring.

This ERC project looks, for the first time, at democratization processes through the lens of social movements’ research. According to Prof. Della Porta, so far, social movements’ studies have missed the importance of social perceptions when addressing the recent pro-democracy protests.

In order to understand the role played by civil society organizations in the different democratization stages, the researchers analysed both the contextual and historical characteristics as well as the actors’ strategies. The first results confirmed the importance of social mobilization in transitions to democracy and showed that, in the cases studied, despite the variety of contexts, there are strong similarities in the participation of civil society in these processes.

Besides focusing on the intervention of social movements during democratic transition periods, Prof. Della Porta has also studied the long-term participation of civil society actors in democracy consolidation processes and the effects of mass mobilization on the quality of democracy.