Analyzing Civil Society Organizations' Changing Structures in the EU. Lessons from the social movement and party politics literature

Sabine Saurugger (1, 2)

1 PACTE - Pacte, Laboratoire de sciences sociales
2 IEPG - Sciences Po Grenoble - Institut d'études politiques de Grenoble

The question of political participation beyond elections is a recurrent subject in contemporary political life. Since the beginning of the 1990s, official European Union documents stress the participation of a so-called ‘organised civil society' , thought to lead to increased democratization of the national and international sphere.
The paper starts from the assumption that this discourse has an effect on ‘civil society actors' and goes on to study the tools developed to analyze these effects, called institutionalization, bureaucratization or professionalization of the organized civil society. The political party and social movement literature has identified these changes empirically and theoretically already at the beginning of the twentieth century. The aim of this paper is to analyze these approaches and to draw lessons for the study of the transformation of civil society organizations' structures in the EU.

Mots clés: Interest groups; organized civil society; professionalization; political parties; social movements; organizational sociology

Mots clés: groupes d'intérêt; société civile organisée; partis politiques; professionnalisation; mouvements sociaux; sociologie des organisations

Domaines: Science politique

Sabine Saurugger. Analyzing Civil Society Organizations' Changing Structures in the EU. Lessons from the social movement and party politics literature. ECPR Joint Sessions, 15-19 April 2009, Lisbon, Workshop 5 « Professionalization and Individualized Collective Action : Analysing New ‘Participatory' Dimensions in Civil Society”., Apr 2009, Lisbonne, Portugal. ⟨halshs-00378202⟩