National Contexts: Partial Democratization and Civil Society

Abstract

This chapter gives background information on democratization processes and the main characteristics of civil society and NGOs in the four selected countries: Guatemala, Honduras, the Philippines and Indonesia. As mentioned in the introduction of this book, despite the differences between these countries, they share a number of characteristics with regard to the indicators of political and economic development. The four have similar scores in the Freedom House ratings, which gives an indication of the “state of democracy.” The index shows that only Indonesia reaches an average score of 2.5, which is just enough to be called “free,” while the other three countries fall in the middle category and are called “partly free” scoring 3 or 4 (Freedom House, 2012a). Also in other indexes, the countries have similar scores (see Table 3.1). This is the case, for instance, in the Human Development Index of the UNDP and in the Index of State Weakness, composed by Rice and Patrick (2008). Both take into account a broader set of economic, social and political indicators. In the Index of State Weakness, the scores of the four states are even closer than in the Freedom House Index. Here, all four countries score between 6.08 and 6.48 on a scale from 0 (weak) to 10 (strong) (see Table 3.1). The countries all come in the third quintile of “states to watch” (the middle category), and they clearly do not belong to the group of “weak states” (second quintile) or “critically weak states” (first quintile).