Civil society – Politically engaged or member-serving? A governance perspective

Nicole Bolleyer

European Union Politics, 2021, vol. 22, issue 3, 495-520

Abstract: Which types of civil society organizations are politicized as indicated by regular political engagement and why? If they are, how wide-ranging are their political action repertoires? This article proposes an ‘organizational governance perspective’ on civil society organizations’ political engagement by arguing that organizations resembling traditional ‘voluntary associations’ are less likely to be politicized and to employ a broad political action repertoire than those resembling highly professionalized ‘voluntary agencies’. Applying event count regressions to new data from four recent population surveys widely substantiates the proposed perspective, thereby challenging prominent arguments about the detrimental effects of professionalization and state dependency on organizations’ ability to contribute to democratic representation.

Keywords: Civil society organizations; organizational governance; political engagement; politicization; professionalization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14651165211000439 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:eeupol:v:22:y:2021:i:3:p:495-520

DOI: 10.1177/14651165211000439

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in European Union Politics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().