INTRODUCTION

Chapter 4 characterized, illustrated, and demonstrated the particular weakness of civil society in post-communist Europe, and Chapter 5 employed statistical analysis to identify and test the explanatory power of a set of individual-level causal factors that could account for levels of participation, both across and within countries. This chapter adopts a very different methodological approach, based on qualitative and interpretive techniques, incorporating the findings from in-depth interviews with 30 East Germans and 30 Russians, conducted in the spring and summer of 1998. The goal here is to reach an understanding of the lives, experiences, motivations, and behavior of post-communist citizens that is far more discerning and complete than can be provided by answers to closed-ended survey questions. This interpretive approach allows for an in-depth consideration of the complex and fascinating life stories of my respondents, thus complementing the statistical approach from the previous chapter.

The objective of this chapter is to provide a detailed discussion of the cognitive and experiential reasons why people do or do not participate in voluntary organizations. Since the distinctive characteristic of post-communist civil society is the low level of participation by ordinary citizens, I devote the bulk of this chapter to the respondents who do not participate in any voluntary organizations. I build upon the three main causal factors that were introduced theoretically in Chapter 2 and analyzed statistically in Chapter 5, but here I spell them out and elaborate them more fully.