Output details

Civil Society and Activism in Europe: Contextualising Engagement and Political Orientations

This volume is the third and final major output of the ESF-funded international research network "Citizen, Involvement, Democracy" (CID) completed under the auspices of the EU-funded 6th Framework Programme Network of Excellence – CONNEX (“Connecting Excellence on European Governance”). Maloney acted as a co-ordinator of this international research team from research design to dissemination. His major contribution should be assessed on the basis of the Introduction (Chapter 1), Conclusion (Chapter 14), substantive contribution (Chapter 6), project design, intellectual leadership and research management. The CID project followed a distinctive methodological approach and research design and involved data collection in 13 countries and 26 European communities. The research design includes three major components: (i) a survey of representative samples of the population in European countries, (ii) a study of voluntary associations in several European cities/communities, and (iii) a survey of citizens active in these associations. The three parts address similar questions about citizenship and involvement. For each part similar research designs have been developed (including common core questionnaires) and implemented in a number of countries. The population project provided analyses of individual citizens’ involvement and the antecedents of different modes of social and political behaviour. The organizational study focused on the collective opportunities and routes for social and political involvement. The activists survey focused on volunteers and active citizens within specific organizational contexts in European cities. The logic behind the surveys of organizations and their members was that organizational features are directly linked to the attitudes and behaviour of volunteers and activists. Furthermore, the characteristics of volunteers and activists are compared with the evidence obtained for the ‘average citizen’ provided by the population surveys. The research undertaken in this third output aims to systematically combine the results of the three parts of the CID-project.