Volunteering and political systems : the role of state and civil society organizations in people’s willingness to volunteer in post-communist Albania

Abstract

There is a widespread concern in Albania about the general waning of civic participation, which has produced weak solidarity networks and formal participation in organizations, together with a loss of a genuine sense of volunteering in the last three decades. This paper aims to give a thorough explanation of this recent change in Albanian society since the 1990s by exploring the two-fold dimensions of the state-society relationship: on one hand, the role of the Albanian communist state and its formal civil society organizations in shaping a forced approach to volunteering before the 1990s, and on the other hand the effects of this phenomenon on Albanian attitudes to volunteering after the 1990s with the collapse of the regime. This two-sided analysis is enriched with discourse analysis of focus groups from two generations: the first born between 1950 and 1970, and the second born in the early 1990s.