Civil Society and Political Participation : What Type of Political Participation is Influenced by Community Level Involvement in Civil Society?

Abstract

The aim of this paper is thus to further explore the relationship between involvement in voluntary associations at the community level and specific forms of political participation. We pose the following questions. Do voluntary associations contribute to specific forms of individual political participation in a consociational context? Do voluntary associations encourage forms of political participation aimed at directly interacting with the policy process, or do they promote extraparliamentary forms of protest? The study contributes with testing three different measurements of community level involvement in voluntary associations and their correlations with individual level political participation. The empirical data is based upon a mulitilevel sample of 4232 individuals located in 33 different Swedish municipalities. Results show that only direct contacts with local elites are significantly correlated with community level participation in civil society organizations. This result may be interpreted as indicating that local voluntary associations contribute to the local political culture.