Barriers to Democracy: The Other Side of Social Capital in Palestine and the Arab World

by Amaney A. Jamal

Democracy-building efforts from the early 1990s on have funneled billions of dollars into nongovernmental organizations across the developing world, with the U.S. administration of George W. Bush leading the charge since 2001. But are many such "civil society" initiatives fatally flawed? Focusing on the Palestinian West Bank and the Arab world, Barriers to Democracy mounts a powerful challenge to the core tenet of civil society namely, that public participation in private associations necessarily yields the sort of civic engagement that, in turn, sustains effective democratic institutions. Such assertions tend to rely on evidence from states that are democratic to begin with. Here, Amaney Jamal investigates the role of civic associations in promoting democratic attitudes and behavioral patterns in contexts that are less than democratic.


Jamal argues that, in state-centralized environments, associations can just as easily promote civic qualities vital to authoritarian citizenship--such as support for the regime in power. Thus, any assessment of the influence of associational life on civic life must take into account political contexts, including the relationships among associations, their leaders, and political institutions.



Barriers to Democracy both builds on and critiques the multifaceted literature that has emerged since the mid-1990s on associational life and civil society. By critically examining associational life in the West Bank during the height of the Oslo Peace Process (1993-99), and extending her findings to Morocco, Egypt, and Jordan, Jamal provides vital new insights into a timely issue.

Genres: Political Science

192 pages, Hardcover

First published April 23, 2007

Reviews

[owlette · Rating 3 out of 5]

(I read chapters 1, 4, and 6, skimmed chapter 2, and skipped 3 and 5.)

In the field of Political Development, there's a(n) (in)famous paper nicknamed "Bowling with Hitler" which argues that not only did the Weimar Republic have a vibrant civil society but that it was that very civic associations that catalyzed the Nazi's takeover of the government. It made a splash in the field because it overturned the unconscious image that civil society was this warm and fuzzy thing, vital for a robust democracy. The classic theory on civil society originated from de Tocqueville's Democracy in America and was modernized by Robert D. Putnam's works (Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy and Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community). Sheri Berman, the author of the paper, pointed out that civil society does not exist in isolation from political context and the kinds of political institutions with which the associations and citizens are exposed to. She couldn’t have had a more damning evidence to the classic Tocquevillian theory than the fall of Weimar Republic.

Jamal's work follows Berman's footstep. Like Berman, she makes a powerful case, for her evidence comes from Palestine, the very site into which international organizations, Western governments, and NGO's are pumping money into society by following the Neo-Tocquevillian theory. Specifically, Jamal argues that in the context of state-centralized clientelism, civic associations will either be acquiescent and embedded in a client-patron relationship or critical and ostracized from such profitable networks. The association's alliance and proximity with the authoritarian state characterizes citizen's level of social trust (i.e. one's expectation of fellow citizens willingness to help and one's own sense of duty to help others), allegiance to the current regime, and support for democratic institutions, all of which runs counter to the classical theory's prediction that civic associations will necessarily foster social trust and practices of civic engagement that will make democracy work from bottom-up.

The part that struck me as finicky about Jamal’s empirical evidence was the operationalization of social trust. A person's level of social trust is measured by their response to two survey questions, the first asking about their expectation that others will help them and the second asking about one's sense of duty to help (see Appendix B of the book). I would assume that one's social trust is high if one responded with "high" for both questions and low if they answered "low" for both.

Jamal claims that in her survey data interpersonal trust was low among respondents belonging to civic associations critical of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) but high among member of civic associations supportive of the regime. The first part I can buy, but the second part I'm not so sure. Jamal's explanation is that the latter group doesn't need the cooperation of other citizens, so they can trust other citizens as much as they want (“the luxury to see others as trustworthy”). The crux of this interpretation is that trust need not mean the lack of distrust, and I'm not sure if I buy that argument. The Chi-square test of her empirical evidence (Table 4.4) merely implies that level of trust (as measured by the survey) is not independent of support for PNA, but it doesn't mean that support for PNA means high level of trust. It could mean that only the lack of support for PNA is strongly correlated with social trust, in which case she has no empirical evidence to support her claim.

But with it without sound evidence, I think her overall argument is persuasive. It makes sense that civil society is not some innocuous layer inoculated from the political institutions of the society. I'm curious to see if there are any work that use any case study of the United States (e.g. Ku Klux Klan and Q-Anon as anti-democratic civic associations).