Norwegian
Membership and Democracy
1 :417-440
Pages: 23
This article is concerned with value-based non-democratically structured voluntary organizations, which constitute an ever-increasing portion of the voluntary sector.
We argue that the democratic significance of these organizations is not accounted for within conventional, empirically oriented research on democracy, including neo-Tocquevillian approaches, in which Robert D. Putnam is a central figure. In the discussion, we distinguish between internal democracy, ie democracy within an organization, and the external democratic role of the organization, ie democracy in a society.
Our point of departure is the role played by passive supporters within the non-democratically structured organizations. We argue that the passive supporters of these organizations are not as marginalized, neither in relation to their organization, nor towards the society at large, as most theories a priori assume. We claim that to an increasing degree, developments in organizational society itself necessitate more emphasis on the external democratic role at the expense of the internal.