Searching for the Origins of Civic Community in the Newly Expanded European Union. Jean Monnet/Robert Schumann Paper Series Vol. 4 No. 18, December 2004

Although many scholars stress the importance of a civic political culture for a functioning democracy, there is little consensus about where such a culture originates. The ‘bottom up’ approach argues that the civic culture has centuries old, enduring roots that in turn shape political and economic institutions. The ‘top down’ approach implies that political culture itself can be shaped by political institutions. Both schools of thought, however, stress the interrelatedness of civic behaviors; voluntary group membership, newspaper readership, and voting are expected to all be high in civic cultures and low elsewhere. In contrast, this article argues that these four components of ‘civicness’ are differently influenced by contemporary political institutions and are therefore less interrelated than previous scholars have hypothesized. Germany and its neighbors in a newly expanded EU provide an excellent laboratory in which to empirically investigate these conflicting hypotheses about the origin of the civic community. If the ‘bottom up’ approach were correct, there would be no differences in the level of civic community between the Eastern and Western parts of Germany and Central Europe since they were separated by the Iron Curtain for only four decades. If the ‘top down’ approach were correct, forty years of communist rule would have indeed reduced the level of civic community in Eastern Germany and Eastern Central Europe. Instead, I find marked differences in voluntary group membership across the former Iron Curtain, but much less divergence in terms of newspaper readership and voter turnout