Introduction

Vital scientific interest toward the development of civil society arises from the idea that a fully fledged third sectorFootnote 1 is one of the pillars of a modern pluralistic and participatory democracy. The rise of the new social movements in Western democracies in the late 1960s and especially the collapse of communist systems in the Central and Eastern Europe gave new impulses to the study of civil society. Political scientists theorized that after the institutionalization of a democratic system, vibrant development of the third sector would induce participant political culture, ensuring that young democracies consolidate (Linz and Stepan 1996; Diamond 1999). Twenty-five years after the beginning of the post-communist transformation, there remain no doubts that civil society is not a given-for-granted platform for democratic development but rather a “third challenge,” after institutionalization of democracy and economic reforms. While some young democracies of Central Europe have achieved higher levels of third sector’s sustainability (with Estonia and Poland as leaders according to the USAID CSO Sustainability Index 2010–2013; cf. also Rikmann and Keedus 2013), other countries, especially those with poorer economic performance and authoritarian regimes, have major shortcomings in many respects.

In order to explain patterns of civic engagement, empirical researchers have addressed individual-level socio-economic and demographic as well as country-level characteristics, paying much attention to social trust and social capital (Paxton 2007; Howard and Gilbert 2008; Sønderskov 2010; Schofer and Longhofer 2011; Wallace et al. 2012). While this kind of cross-national analysis highlights fundamental relationships, it remains limited in what it can reveal about the motives of civic engagement in each of the states. Yet the country-specific context of associational life is not only of theoretical interest but acquires additional importance when policy makers and donors decide about the support of civil society organizations (CSOs) in the states that have no stable democratic rule and tradition of participation. Without a profound understanding of the socio-economic situation and peculiarities of the political culture of a particular country, the allocation of financial aid can be ineffective or even futile.

In focus of our research are the mechanisms of institutional transformation in post-Soviet Ukraine, a country that has recently experienced two state crises caused by mass protests (in 2004/2005 and 2013/2014) on the one hand, but has a notoriously low level of civic engagement on the other hand. Over all the years of country’s independence, the share of respondents who declared to belong to a political movement, social organization, or club remained almost unchanged: around 17 %.Footnote 2 Against this background, the promotion of democracy through donor assistance seems to have had a much smaller effect on the population than it could have been expected.

New prospects concerning the development of civil society opened up after the so-called “orange revolution,” a successful revolt against electoral fraud in 2004, which, however, was eventually wasted as it ended up in political turmoil and deep civic disenchantment. Most of the expectations concerning the growth of citizens’ activism, as a part of an overall civic optimism, have been disappointed (Golovaha and Panina 2006; White and McAllister 2009). Surprisingly enough, in the end of 2013 Ukrainian society was again able to display an impressive ability for self-organization. After the victory of the “Euromaidan” (post hoc also called “revolution of dignity”) over the regime of president Yanukovych, tens of thousands of people formed political organizations and civic initiatives and volunteered as different kinds of helpers in the armed conflict in the Donbas region. The question is as follows: Will this sharp rise in activism lead to the development of a European-style civil society in Ukraine? Or, in other words, do the same factors determine the readiness of citizens to participate in spontaneous mass protests and enduring participation in third sector organizations?

In order to answer these questions we need to take a closer look at the attitudes, motivations, and mechanisms of civic engagement. Our paper aims at a mechanism-based explanation of the long-lasting weakness of civil society in Ukraine. We address this issue by applying the explanatory scheme of analytical sociology (e.g., Coleman 1990; Hedström and Bearman 2009). The representatives of this paradigm outline the proper explanation as identifying the entities (and their properties), activities, and relations that jointly produce the collective outcome to be explained (Hedström and Bearman 2009, p. 8). Following the three steps of the explanatory scheme, our explanation of the macro-phenomenon weak civil society considers (1) situational, (2) action-formation, and (3) transformational mechanisms. In order to link the social macro-level to the micro-level of individual actions, we formulate a number of assumptions about how the Soviet legacy and the post-communist transformation period shaped the beliefs, values, and motives of individuals in the contemporary Ukraine. These hypotheses concern the action-formation mechanisms that explain why people decide to join—or not to join—CSOs (“Individual Level: Homo (Post-)Sovieticus” section). Using national survey data described in the third section, we empirically test our hypotheses (“Results” section). In the last section, we turn to transformational mechanisms to outline how individual actions in their combination result in a weak civil society. We also briefly discuss how the underdevelopment of Ukrainian third sector and the “revolution of dignity” might be linked together. By implementing the approach of analytical sociology, we seek to complement the investigations of social scientists who specified various factors of underdevelopment of civil society in Ukraine (Gromadzki et al. 2010; Stepanenko 2006; Stewart 2009), but did not go the whole way of analytical explanation.

Explanatory Elements

Structural Level: Political and Economic Conditions

A high correlation between the Democracy Index 2013 and the CSO Sustainability Index 2013 of the Central and East European post-communist countriesFootnote 3 (r = 0.88, p < 0.05; Fig. 1) indicates a strong connection between the level of democratic and civil society development. Another distinct correlation between the Human Development Index 2013 and the CSO Sustainability Index 2013 (r = 0.60, p < 0.05; Fig. 2) supports the common idea that the strength of civil society goes in line with the standard of living.

Fig. 1
figure 1

Correlation between the Democracy Index and the CSO Sustainability Index in 2013. The Democracy Index is compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit and ranges from 0 (lowest) to 10 (highest rank). The CSO Sustainability Index is provided by the US Agency for International Development and ranges from 7 (lowest) to 1 (highest rank)

Full size image
Fig. 2
figure 2

Correlation between the Human Development Index and the CSO Sustainability Index in 2013. The Human Development Index ranges from 0 to 1 (lowest and highest level respectively)

Full size image

These relationships illustrate that political and economic conditions are of crucial importance for the development of civil society. Macro-level properties of a social system constitute the “given reality” for individual and corporate actors by creating opportunities for and imposing restrictions on them. The renaissance of the concept of civil society in the course of anti-communist resistance in Central and Eastern Europe led to the understanding of civil society as opposed to the omnipotent state. This resulted in some idealization of associational life and a conceptual underestimation of the state’s role in shaping civil society, especially in the case when the state does not follow the rule of law. Meanwhile it has been widely acknowledged that the rule of law is an essential principle of any modern democratic system and a critical precondition for successful post-communist transformation (Howard 2003, p. 32ff.; Gromadzki et al. 2010, p. 26). Recent theoretical and empirical research asserts the importance of political structures and institutions in shaping the third sector. It was found that while in different democratic regimes state–civil society relations differ (Stadelmann-Steffen and Freitag 2010), they generally remain of key importance for the development of associational life (cf. Cepel 2012 for Finland; Strachwitz 2010 for Germany; Sundstrom 2006, p. 103ff. for Russia; Young 2010 for the USA). Arguing that modern state is an engine that drives the growth of civic organizations, Schofer and Longhofer (2011, p. 540) point out that besides being a locus of opportunities and constraints, the state is a key source of the identities, purposes, and legitimations that generally underlie civic life.

Using Young’s (2000) typology of state–civil society relations (supplementary, complementary, and adversarial) we can distinguish between patterns of such relations in different countries. Contrary to consolidated democracies where supplementary and complementary relations prevail, in post-Soviet countries, the adversarial relationship seems to be dominant: civic organizations oppose the government, lobby for reforms, try to secure human rights (thus fulfilling the so-called watchdog function) or to achieve some improvement in certain administrative activities or leisure, while the paternalistic state continues to conduct restrictive policies. Palyvoda and Golota (2010, p. 52) note that one of the main barriers for effective cooperation between CSOs and government agencies in Ukraine has been a lack of understanding of the benefits of such cooperation from the side of the government. Support for this statement can be found in other reports (Kuts and Palyvoda 2006; USAID 2010–2013), though it seems more appropriate to argue that such an adversarial relationship results not so much from a lack of understanding, but is rather an inherent feature of the transitional authoritarianism (for this concept see Maćków 2009 and especially the contribution by A. Kolodii for the case of Ukraine). The presidency of Yanukovych, which began 2010, was characterized by strengthening of authoritarian rule. Administrative obstacles to CSO activities and intimidation of activists by governmental bodies, not least by the Security Service of Ukraine SBU, became more frequent in the years 2010 and 2011, with some public authorities stealing project ideas from CSOs and developing municipal enterprises to channel funding away from them (USAID 2010, p. 205ff.; USAID 2011, p. 210ff.). The peak of adversarial (despite some slight positive developments in 2012–2013) relations between the state and civil society fell within the month of the “Euromaidan,” when CSOs played a key role in organizing the protests at the end of the year (cf. USAID 2013, p. 223).

Unfavorable political conditions were accompanied by a difficult economic situation. In his comparative study, Howard (2003, p. 73ff.) has found evidence for a strong positive relationship between economic well-being and organizational membership. The economic argument is particularly relevant for Ukraine, which had one of the worst economic records of all post-communist transformation states. In the 2010, Ukrainian third sector had to struggle with financial problems caused by dropping membership dues, decreasing donations (especially from local donors), difficulties with earning revenues from service delivery, and deepening macroeconomic crisis (cf. USAID 2010–2013). After the violent end of the presidency of Yanukovych and due to the armed conflict in the Donbas region, Ukraine faces a large number of severe economic challenges. Such “old” problems as high poverty rates, a weak social security system, slow modernization of economy and public administration fade into the background in the face of budget deficit and default risk, soaring inflation rates and devaluation of the national currency, a problematic situation with energy security, and other. If we agree with R. Dahrendorf that “civil society requires opportunities of participation which in the OECD societies (if not universally) are provided by work and a decent minimum standard of living,” we must follow his conclusion that “once these are lost by a growing number, civil society goes with them” (Dahrendorf 1996, p. 239).

To sum up, the importance of the first and the second sector (i.e., state and economy) for the development of the third sector is obvious. When under conditions of general insecurity and uncertainty people’s activities base more on interpersonal trust than on formal rules and institutions, informal networks expand quicker than the economy and consolidate stronger than the political system.

Individual Level: Homo (Post-)Sovieticus

Since organizations always consist of individuals, we should turn to attitudes of people in order to understand why they establish or join CSOs. The perception of the social macro-situation has a decisive role for people’s actions. Taking into account what has been said above about the “objective,” i.e., political and economic constraints, it is logical to assume that poorer people are less likely to engage in voluntary organizations (H1), because those who have to cope with financial difficulties can be expected to spend their time and effort to ensure their basic needs rather than engage in non-profit activities. Civic engagement often implies financial costs (membership dues, expenditure on transport and communication, etc.). Moreover, apart from individual welfare in absolute terms, a person’s comparison of her income to an average income in the reference group can affect her motivation. This means that if a person perceives her position in a society as low she is inclined to seek for additional source of income to improve her socio-economic status. Thus, our first hypothesis can be reformulated in subjective terms: people who perceive their socioeconomic status as low are less likely to engage in voluntary organizations (H2).

The next significant factor to be considered is personal socialization experiences, including the interaction with social institutions. For the major part of Ukrainians, these experiences are still related to the Soviet past. From the early childhood, Soviet citizens learned to be a part of the bigger whole by participating in different structures that were created and maintained by the state. Under a full state management of one’s life, adaptation to established rules was less costly than attempts to change the situation. Socialization in Soviet institutions led to the formation of a special sociocultural personality of Homo Sovieticus (Levada 1993)—the ideal Soviet citizen was deindividualized and could be easily controlled by the state because of his strong paternalistic and imperialistic attitudes. Showing devotion to the communist ideology implied joining different kinds of organizations which were also the main channels of social mobility. Membership in an organization of the communist party, trade union, military association, etc., was a precondition for achieving higher positions at work and getting access to many goods and services. In this way, public passivity was effectively concealed through official membership in organizations, which “was based mainly on obligation, obedience, and external conformity, rather than internal and voluntary initiatives” (Howard 2003, p. 27).

Analyzing the sharp decline of organizational membership in post-communist countries, B. Weßels argues that the “overorganization” of communist societies explains to a large extent the shrinking of the third sector in the first years of post-communist transformation. Survey data show that the level of organizational membership in the post-Soviet Ukraine rapidly dropped from 81.4 % in 1991 to 29.6 % in 2001 (Weßels 2003, p. 177f.). These figures make clear that only under conditions of voluntary participation the level of organizational membership is an adequate indicator of civil society development. Today, when the situation has radically changed and people are no more forced to join formal organizations, being a member of a CSO is a true matter of personal choice. There are hardly any external incentives—often enough, as has been argued above, people are even being discouraged—to engage in publicly useful activities or to spend leisure time “meaningfully.” In such a situation, first of all those individuals opt for activism and participation, who are able to set up their goals independently and rely on their own decisions in the process of reaching them, contrary to people who got used to externally created frames of action and the idea that someone (for example, the state) will set such frames for them. Drawing on the Self-Determination Theory (Deci and Ryan 1985), researchers have found that autonomous and intrinsic motivation has a positive influence on volunteering and work performance (Bidee et al. 2013; Haivas et al. 2012; Oostlander et al. 2014). Hence we can generally assume that persons who hold an active position toward managing their own life are more apt to join CSOs Footnote 4 (H3).

This assumption is also backed by the political culture approach of Almond and Verba (1963). According to their conceptualization of the subjective dimension of the political system, passiveness and output orientation are the key features of the subject political culture. The participant political culture can be attested to the citizens if they possess comprehensive political orientations and actively contribute to political life, while the parochial political culture is characterized by the absence of political knowledge and mixed feelings of citizens toward the political system. If we presume that a distinct political orientation can be considered as an expression of the participant political culture, we can hypothesize that citizens with a clear political orientation are more likely to be members of the third sector organizations than those who have no clear political orientation (H4). Such relationship was confirmed, among others, in empirical studies of R. Bekkers (2005) and Howard and Gilbert (2008).

An important part of orientations toward the political system is social trust. On the macro-level of the social structure, low generalized trust is associated with less public support of CSOs’ activities (Kuts and Palyvoda 2006; Sønderskov 2010; Weßels 2003). As part of individual’s social capital, trust is a crucial precondition for engaging in cooperative collective action (Coleman 1990, p. 300ff.; Cook and Gerbasi 2009). In communist times, the society functioned in two “modes”: there were “visible”—and to a large extent untrusted—official state organizations, activities, and relationships on the one hand and a “hidden” reality of informal networks, interpersonal relationships, and interactions on the other. The latter have proved to be more genuine and reliable in the course of time. Applying an experiential approach to the post-communist continuity and change, M. Howard considered informal networks as an impediment or an alternative to formal organizational membership in post-communist times. He found that in contrast to Russia, where informal networks are still persistent, a decline of informal networks in Eastern Germany is a significant factor of increasing organizational membership (Howard 2003, p. 107ff.). Borisova et al. (2014) stress the distinction between generic and specialized social capital, which they associate with informal relationships and formal organizational structures, respectively. The authors argue that in the studied case of self-governance of Russian homeowners associations (HOA) generic, or conventional, social capital rises in significance when specific, “technical civic competence” is lacking so that the participants are unable to operate the institution of HOA (Borisova et al. 2014, p. 611).

In Ukraine, informal social capital is still a very powerful factor in getting ahead in life (e.g., for improving career prospects, getting good education, access to high-quality health care, etc.). Moreover, during the times of post-communist socio-economic crisis, informal networks were of great importance as a source of moral support and a factor of stability in society (E. Golovaha, quoted in Stepanenko 2006, p. 584). The specific nature of informal relationships is that they are regulated through normative conventions which are implicitly accepted by interacting actors as opposed to formal relationships which are subordinate to the regulations of law. As a result, informal conventions can be interpreted in different ways or be violated without tangible consequences for those who break arrangements. Therefore, people are not likely to engage in informal relationships if they are not sure about the trustworthiness of their partners. That is why informal ties become established exclusively between individuals who personally trust each other or by recommendation of trusted persons. In the empirical part, we assess the importance of formal and informal networks on the basis of expression of trust toward persons with whom an individual interacts directly on a regular basis: family, friends, neighbors, and colleagues. In case of interactions with the family members, friends, or neighbors, we usually speak of informal social networks, while relationships with colleagues have a more formal character. Involvement in formal social networks can have positive consequences for a number of important skills such as teamwork, bargaining and organizational skills, special knowledge (for example, legal expertise), taking of personal responsibility for collective matters, etc. By contrast, being highly dependent on a closed informal community of family members and best friends implies being less “open to the world” and, hence, less interested to create a common good for a broader community. Contemporary social theory describes this opposition as bonding and bridging social capital (for discussion of bridging and bonding aspects of social capital in Central and Eastern Europe see Letki 2009). The basic insight behind this distinction is that “the more dependent individuals are on close associates and kin, the more they are likely to think of the world in terms of ‘we’ vs. ‘they’, where ‘we’ is a limited group” (Paxton 2007, p. 54). Such people should be less inclined to engage in civic organizations that produce a public good. Thus, our next hypothesis can be formulated as follows: The more people rely on their informal networks, the less they are likely to be members of civic organizations (H5).

Although some persistent social structures, norms, and habits have helped to maintain general social order, the state of Ukrainian society after the collapse of the Soviet Union may be reasonably described as anomie (Durkheim). As Cockerham et al. (2006, p. 1802) argue, Durkheim “helps us to recognize that when a situation of over-regulation exists, as in the former Soviet Union, the replacement of that system with a different social structure may lead to conditions of under-regulation or anomie rather than a restoration of balance.” Many Soviet values and desirable biographical goals were no more relevant after 1991, while a new system of values had not been yet established. In 1992, an overwhelming majority of people in Ukraine agreed with the following statements (Vorona and Šulha 2010, p. 503f.): “Nowadays everything is so uncertain that it seems to me anything can happen” (84.8 %) and “Much of what our parents believed in is being destroyed before our eyes” (88.1 %). The impact of anomie has been studied in different contexts: as a factor of decline in childbearing (Perelli-Harris 2008), in studies of the health lifestyles (Cockerham et al. 2006) or as a cause of an increase in suicide rates (Kõlves et al. 2013). In Ukraine, after two decades of rather negative experience with multiple insecurities of the transformation period—and the failed “orange revolution” in particular—many people tended to avoid participation in the public sphere not least because they did not know what to believe in. Therefore, we hypothesize that the higher degree of anomie and disappointment a person shows, the less likely she is to join voluntary organizations (H6). As the transformation period was especially difficult for the older generations that spent the biggest part of their lives under communism, and as the effect of Soviet socialization would become weaker over time, especially by those who experienced Soviet institutions only for a short period, younger generation can be expected to be more likely to participate in voluntary organizations (H7).

Data and Variables

We test our hypotheses using the cross-section data from the two waves of the Monitoring survey conducted in 2010 and 2014Footnote 5 by the Institute of Sociology of the National Academy of Science of Ukraine. The data contain 1800 observations for each year and are representative of the Ukrainian population aged 18 and older. The Monitoring data are especially suitable for our research, since they provide not only the necessary information on a quite large list of organizational affiliations, but also the most relevant indicators of the specific post-Soviet attitudes of citizens. Moreover, contrary to many other national surveys, the questionnaire of the Monitoring contains a comprehensive set of questions concerning subjective and objective economic welfare of households.

The dependent variables used in our study are individual membership status and participation/support of the “Euromaidan,” both measured as dichotomous variables (Appendix). Several studies express skepticism concerning such traditional way of measuring of CSO membership. The argument is that it is impossible to distinguish between individuals who are actively involved in the activities of an organization and those for whom “participation” means only a nominal affiliation (Howard and Gilbert 2008). The opponents of this view, however, point to the fact that even a passive membership creates a sense of belonging to a real or an imagined community (Sønderskov 2010). Moreover, passive memberships are more typical for organizations that produce a public good (for example, passive membership may be attained through contribution payments to an environmental organization) than to associations that provide direct benefits to its members (e.g., sports or recreational organization). This means that passive members also make their contributions to the functioning of CSOs and a public good. The non-differentiating approach to membership measurement seems to be appropriate in the context of post-Soviet Ukraine not only because the total organizational participation rate is very low, but also because membership status is very likely to indicate the actual involvement of people. As there was no tradition of membership in voluntary independent organizations in Soviet times and being a member of a CSO today is not necessarily a socially approved behavior, the reported membership is most likely not nominal. Another argument is that in conditions of widespread poverty people are less likely to donate money than to volunteer for an activity.

As independent variables we selected different indicators which are related to our hypotheses. First and foremost these are aspects connected to the notion of Homo Sovieticus: passive position in life, higher level of anomie, reliance on informal networks, and political apathy. Looking at the distribution of answers to the question that asks people to identify a political ideology they feel closer to (given a list of alternatives and an opportunity to indicate another option), we found out that 50.7 % of the population in the year 2010 and 49.3 % in 2014 stated that they have no preferences, have not decided yet, or simply “have no notion of these ideologies” (the refusals to answer make up 0.1 % and were coded as missing values). Based on the initial variable, we computed a dummy that takes on value 1 if a person reported her political preference and 0 otherwise. This dummy is treated as an indicator for an articulated political preference.

The anomic tendencies in the Ukrainian population are measured in the Monitoring survey on a regular basis through a battery of items, which was adapted from the scale of Srole (1956) and validated for Ukraine by N. Panina in 1990. The index of anomie and demoralization is computed for every person and ranges between 0 and 17, with the larger values indicating a higher level of anomie and demoralization.

We use questions on trust in family, neighbors, and colleagues as the proxy variables that are thought to be indicators for the level of development of individual informal and formal networks. Active position in life is measured by a dummy variable constructed on the basis of the question “What in your opinion determines the course of your life in the first place?” with five answer categories, which were grouped as follows: “life depends mostly on me/life depends more on me than on circumstances” contrary to “life depends mostly on circumstances/life depends more on circumstances than on me/life depends equally on me and on circumstances.”

In addition, we include in our model the socio-economic status of respondent’s household in objective (logarithm of monthly income per household member in national currency, employment status, and educational attainment) and subjective measures (subjective social status). Respective demographic variables for age, gender, and place of residence were also included in the model.

Results

Although our main goal is to investigate the factors that affect people’s propensity to engage in CSOs, we make use of the possibility to compare the results with the impact of the same factors on the support of the “Euromaidan.” The coefficients reported in Table 1 come from the estimations of maximum-likelihood probit regression models.Footnote 6 The first two columns of the table contain average marginal effects representing the average change of probability for a person to join a CSO associated with changes in each of the regressors. The third column shows the impact of the same factors on participation in the “Euromaidan” or an active support of the protesters (donation of money, foods, clothes, etc.).

Table 1 Probit regression model predicting the membership in CSOs, average marginal effects
Full size table

Our data reveal that the overall level of CSO membership in Ukraine is rather low and amounts to 16 % in 2010 and 13 % in 2014. At the same time, 17 % of the population either personally took part in the protests during the “Euromaidan,” or supported the protesters with donations. These two sorts of activism are only partly overlapping: among the participants/supporters of the “Euromaidan” 73.9 % were not members of any CSO.

In the statistical analysis, affiliation to a political ideology was the only factor which, on the one hand, had a distinct impact and significance, and on the other hand, accounted for all three cases: membership in CSOs in both years 2010 and 2014 and sympathy with the “Euromaidan.” This finding supports our hypothesis concerning the participant political culture (H4). The data show that, on average, the probability to join a CSO was 10 to 12 % lower for those Ukrainians, who were not able to report their political preferences. The impact for the support of the “Euromaidan” is comparable. The second factor, which had a significant effect for CSO membership in both years and for protesting, is the higher educational attainment. Better educated people display more activism, probably because they tend to be generally more aware of the (macro) situation in the country and feel more responsible for the social whole.

An interesting finding is that being a student proved to be the strongest determinant of civic engagement. We suppose, however, that this factor should be relativized, because students’ engagement might be attributed to a large network of formal students’ organizations as well as participation in different kinds of collective and organized leisure activities. The factor age was, contrary to our assumption (H7), not significant.

The positive effect of the dummy, which indicates an active position in life (H3) on CSO membership, is significant for the year 2010, but not any more for 2014. Our data also indicate that a higher level of disappointment and anomie was associated with a lower propensity to engage in civic organizations in 2010 (H6). Although this effect is rather weak, it is statistically significant. The results show that one point change on the anomie scale is associated with a drop in probability to join CSOs on average by 0.5 %. In 2014, the negative effect is not significant when it relates to the participation in CSOs. However, those who actively protested against antidemocratic politics during the “Euromaidan,” in general, were less disoriented and alienated than the rest of the population.

It is a widespread consensus in the public discourse and social science that Ukrainians, not least because of the fruitless “orange revolution,” have tended to pessimism regarding future prospects and nostalgia for the Soviet past. They clearly have preferred the authoritarian order to what they often think of as “liberal disorder.” A constant comparison between the experienced (though ostensible) stability in the Soviet past and the frustrating insecure present has made most of the people reluctant to take part in the political and social life. They have been and still are rather looking for a strong leader to fix problems for them. According to the Monitoring survey, the share of Ukrainians who agreed with the statement that “a couple of strong leaders can do more for the country than all laws and discussions” has been continuously growing during the last 15 years and amounted from 40.5 % in 1994 to 63.5 % in 2010 and remained on this level till 2014 (63.2 %).

Our data provide no support for the economic marginalization thesis (H1): the effect of household income per capita is not significant. However, a closer look at the income distribution shows that there might be a pitfall. The majority of the respondents in our datasets is located on the bottom of the income distribution: the median income per capita in 2010 was 810 UAH, and in 2014—1367 UAH, which is comparable to the official subsistence minimum.Footnote 7 The effect of the objective welfare could, hence, have remained uncovered, since our sample consists predominantly of people with low incomes, who, as a rule, give priority to paid work or various other coping strategies to support their families. A more elaborated research on this issue is needed. On the other hand, the subjective social status was an important predictor of CSO membership in 2010 (H2) as well as of the support of the “Euromaidan.” People who perceived themselves as occupying higher rungs of the social ladder were not only more likely to join CSOs in 2010, but also be involved in the mass protests in 2013/2014.

The coefficients of the three variables capturing trust in family, neighbors, and colleagues suggest that higher trust in colleagues, that is, trust placed on rather formal relationships, is associated with a higher probability to civically engage. In contrast, higher trust in relatives and neighbors negatively affects the probability that a person would be a member of a CSO. This empirical evidence indirectly supports our hypothesis stating that the more people rely on their informal networks, the less they are likely to participate in CSOs (H5). According to Monitoring 2010, 57 % of respondents believed that family members and friends could protect their rights and interests most effectively (Vorona and Šulha 2010, p. 621).Footnote 8 This was by far the most frequently indicated answer followed by “don’t know” (22 %) and “all those persons, who could help me for bribes” (15.5 %). It is remarkable that the trust variables are not significant in the case of the “Euromaidan” support, which means that citizens took part in mass protests or supported them irrespectively of the degree of their reliance on formal and informal networks. This finding points to a difference between enduring engagement in CSOs and a rather anonymous participation in bigger events like demonstrations.

Finally, we might note that the capital city Kyiv is marked by a significantly higher rate of CSO members and “Euromaidan” protesters compared to other big cities and towns of Ukraine, what is to a certain amount self-explaining. Furthermore, the dwellers of the western region reported to be more involved in the “Euromaidan” than people from other regions of Ukraine. This finding is also not surprising, since the public opinion in the west of the country is known to favor strongly the European vector of development, while voters of this region showed the lowest support of Yanukovych during the presidential election in 2010.

Conclusion and Discussion

The evidence we have presented in this paper suggests that the weakness of civil society in Ukraine has many causes. On the one hand, an unsupportive state and a difficult macroeconomic situation have created an unfavorable environment for the development of the third sector. On the other hand, low civic engagement seems to be rooted in a widespread passivity and disappointment, paternalistic orientations of citizens, and anomic society. Affiliation to a political ideology, higher education and student status, as well as trust in colleagues (as a proxy for relying on formal networks) are positively associated with CSO membership. Contrary to our expectations, the effect of objective income level was not discerned.

In accordance with our claim to adhere to the principles of analytical sociology (see “Introduction” section), as a concluding step, we suggest some transformational mechanisms that explain how individual decisions are interconnected and bring about the collective phenomenon of a weak civil society.

Apart from a sheer aggregation, the first mechanism to mention is the lack of organizational experience, special knowledge, and “technical civic competence” to engage in formal relationships. People would probably self-organize into associations to pursue common goals, if they better knew how to establish and run a CSO. But since there is no tradition of the third sector engagement in the Ukrainian society, people often have no such knowledge and are very restricted in opportunities to get such experience. As a result, they simply may fail in their cooperative efforts, even if they feel an urge to undertake them. This implies that until the practices of CSOs are more widely spread and acknowledged by the larger groups of society, Ukrainians are likely to make use of the old “reliable” informal ways to cope with their problems. Mutual orientation toward the normative conventions of informal relationships is another, closely connected with the first, transformational mechanism. As we argued above (“Results” section), due to persistence of informal networks in the post-Soviet countries, informal relationships are still considered the most effective way of solving problems. Sustainability of informal networks at the individual level produces a respective social norm at the macro-level. As a consequence, individuals might tend to (willingly or unconsciously) replace formal structures and rules of interaction with familiar ways of informal exchange. In this way, ubiquitous norms of “reciprocity” can pervade and erode formally arranged cooperation, slowing down the establishment of public civic activity and thus hindering further integration of society.

A third mechanism deals with the threshold models of collective behavior (Granovetter and Soong 1983; Hedström 1994). This model describes how individuals decide on their actions taking into account the information transmitted through social networks. That is, choices of people’s actions are interdependent in the way that every person has her own subjective “threshold” defining the number of other persons around, who should perform certain behavior to induce this person to a similar action. For example, an individual’s decision about joining a CSO can be influenced by the anticipated number of other individuals who have already joined such organizations. For one person, it could suffice to have one member of CSO among acquaintances to copy the behavior, for another person this number could be not less than ten. Taking into account that the overall level of organizational membership in Ukraine is very low, the thresholds of many individuals are certainly not reached, and as a result, the current weakness of civil society has a self-reinforcing negative effect.

To step out of this vicious circle, the effort should be directed to cultivation of personal activity and responsibility of citizens. This can be achieved through primary support of small initiatives that can in a relatively short term bring about tangible positive changes in direct vicinity of their participants. Such small initiatives could be housing committees, small environmental groups, consumers’ associations, self-organized childcare, refugee helpers, recreational communities, etc. All such organizations contribute to enhancement of the life quality of those who engage. Moreover, sometimes they contribute also to the common good as they create benefits for a larger community (for example, a small environmental group that takes care of a lawn in front of a house contributes to the ecology of the neighborhood). In light of these conclusions, the donor assistance to Ukraine, which aims to foster the development of the third sector, should be readdressed. We suggest that Ukrainian civic organizations (and grant donors) focus less on overall promotion of democratization but more on projects that contribute to improvement of life quality. Although these projects tackle smaller issues, their beneficial outcomes would be perceptible by people, thereby improving the image of associational activities in general. In the medium and long run, it could turn out to be a more effective way of promoting democratization.

What kind of development of civic engagement can be expected after the “Euromaidan”? Apparently, the “revolution of dignity” was made primarily by those representatives of Ukrainian society, who were less prone to the overall anomie and were not ready to tolerate the authoritarian kleptocratic regime. The victory of the protesters over the president Yanukovych and his accomplices and probably even more the armed conflict in the Donbas region have had a great motivating effect on many Ukrainians, individually as well as on whole groups. And yet we must not forget that the formation of mass protests was a spontaneous reaction (as opposed to action), an expression of a broad public resentment about a political fraud, whereas engagement in CSOs has surely more to do with planned and enduring social activity. While the extraordinary challenges, with which Ukrainians are currently confronted, give hope that citizens’ activism will gain momentum, the multitude of negative factors leaves room only for cautious optimism.