CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 1,108Political Theory and DemocracyPolitical Conflict and GovernanceEuropean Political History Analysis

Civil Society and the Collapse of the Weimar Republic

Berman, Sheri·1997·World Politics
DOI 10.1353/wp.1997.0008
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

Practically everywhere one looks these days the concept of “civil society” is in vogue. Neo-Tocquevillean scholars argue that civil society plays a role in driving political, social, and even economic outcomes. This new conventional wisdom, however, is flawed. It is simply not true that democratic government is always strengthened, not weakened, when it faces a vigorous civil society. This essay shows how a robust civil society helped scuttle the twentieth century's most critical democratic experiment, Weimar Germany. An important implication of this analysis is that under certain circumstances associationism and the prospects for democratic stability can actually be inversely related. To know when civil society activity will take on oppositional or even antidemocratic tendencies, one needs to ground one's analyses in concrete examinations of political reality. Political scientists should remember that Tocqueville considered Americans' political associations to be as important as their nonpolitical ones, and they should therefore examine more closely the connections between the two under various conditions.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1353/wp.1997.0008

Cites

95 of 95 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Claims the paper makes

This paper’s full text isn’t openly available, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • There is no evidence that imbalances between civil society participation and party institutionalization subvert their protective effects over the large number of cases in the sample.

    “We find no evidence that imbalances between the two subvert their protective effects over the large number of cases that our sample encompasses, despite the documented findings of high visibility small-n studies (Berman 1997, Riley 2010).”

    From Parties, Civil Society, and the Deterrence of Democratic Defection (2020) · cites this paper as Berman 1997

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
Berman, S.
Affiliations
Princeton University (US)
Corresponding author
Berman, Sheri
ORCID
Berman, Sheri
Venue
World Politics
Publisher
Project MUSE
Published
1997-04
Volume
49
Issue
3
Pages
401-429
ISSN
  • 0043-8871 (ISSN-L)
  • 1086-3338
DOI
10.1353/wp.1997.0008
OpenAlex
W2135083689
Semantic Scholar
45d7e7d61f47e9d066246332621ed7046b9fdd04
Cited by
1,108
References
95
Citations by year
2026: 25 · 2025: 48 · 2024: 52 · 2023: 70 · 2022: 31 · 2021: 43 · 2020: 54 · 2019: 81 · 2018: 89 · 2017: 36 · 2016: 22 · 2015: 34 · 2014: 49 · 2013: 32 · 2012: 31
FWCI
47.50
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Licence
www.cambridge.org/core/terms (unspecified, 5186 d)
Locations
  • World Politics (publishedVersion)
  • Project Muse (Johns Hopkins University) (submittedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Political Theory and Democracy
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Political Conflict and Governance
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History › European Political History Analysis
Keywords
civil society, Weimar Republic, collapse of democracy, associationism, democratic stability, political associations, Alexis de Tocqueville

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review