Jalal Fetrati, "Partisan Civil Society: The Effects of Political Polarization"
Colloquium Series
Date:
Apr 28, 2023 - 03:00pm
Location:
Sociology Commons (SSCI 1061)
Presenter/s:
Jalal Fetrati is a Ph.D. student in sociology at the University of New Mexico. His research interests revolve around the comparative politics of authoritarian regimes, democratization, contentious politics, government repression, and the Middle East. His recent paper, entitled "Non-Violent Resistance Movements and Substantive Democracy," has been published in Democratization.Against the surge of ‘third wave’ authoritarian governments across the globe, projects to establish or deepen democracy rest upon a civil sphere that provides the cultural and institutional foundations for democracy. How does political polarization impact the robustness of civil society across societies? This paper shows that when society is divided into acutely antagonistic camps, the resulting partisan civil society may then be manipulated or captured by autocratic leaders/parties. We draw on democratic theory and fixed-effects panel regression models to demonstrate that higher levels of political polarization are associated with less robust civil societies, with the latter sometimes embodying anti-democratic stances favoring authoritarian leaders. Struggles to defend and deepen democracy must not take the civil sphere for granted but rather confront efforts to undermine it.
