This paper provides a comparative analysis to examine the process of civil society institutionalization. Political history, economic forces and the cultural landscape of different environments directly shape organizational desires and the impact of advocacy in the public sphere. Peru and the US have different political landscapes and histories of social life. This study provides three case studies of Peruvian social organizations to reveal different structures and motivations than those found in US organizations. These different institutional objectives suggest that more factors are at play in shaping public participation in political life, and thus the public sphere. In conclusion, I argue that the public sphere is not a singular entity applicable to all environments, but a space built by respective political and cultural histories.

This research examines Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) as a dynamic and important element of civil society. As a component of a larger research venture, my work focuses on NGO's portrayal in American Newspapers. I seek to define the discursive positioning manifested through news articles focusing on and relating to our sample of Urban and Women's NGO's. The research process makes use of an exhaustively produced codebook employed to methodically classify the primary documents, newspaper articles from one of four news sources, published in 2004. The coding process records both manifest and latent content in the articles. The first set of measured and recorded variables provides a ledger of structural details about the article, including title, newspaper, word count and number of times a specific NGO is mentioned in the article. The second set of variables delves into the presentation and reporting taken on the part of the newspaper in regards to the specific NGO. The questions in the codebook encompass a wide range of description which allows for a subtle spectrum of values, as recorded through the different provided answers to each of the questions on the code sheet. The project is now at the stage where coding is predicted to be finished in the near future. From that point, analysis can begin on the data compiled from the complete coding efforts. This analysis which points to the discursive positioning of NGO's, as manifested in American newspapers, will then be integrated with research being currently conducted by other members of the research team, in order to more broadly assess the roles, manifested and described, of NGO's in civil society.

Organizations (NGOs) constitute a democratic element of civil society: Are these institutions inclusive of their followers and welcoming toward new participants, or do they act as exclusive membership groups that effectively act on behalf of the public which has a vested interest in their campaigns? In other words, in what sense are these NGOs “representative” of civil society? Our group worked to compose a codebook which we could use to methodically classify the outreach undertaken by these NGOs in their monthly newsletters. Before the quantitative exercise of going through the content of the newsletters, it was necessary to meticulously define our concepts in a way which would be applicable to each NGO in the study. After coding twelve months of newsletters for three separate NGOs, we are now at a point where we can step back and take a holistic and comparative view of the NGOs we have researched. The conclusions that we have observed from our research and coding of the newsletters for the European Women's Lobby, Women Against Violence in Europe, and WIDE show that these networks predominantly function as exclusive groups and are not concerned with seeking out collective participation. We have also observed that much the information about events usually comes in the past tense, as a summary of what has already been done. We discovered that many of these networks function as 'umbrella organizations', and the majority of the events that they participate in, and report on, are products of other organizations. Based on the communication through newsletters, these organizations function primarily as a report on past events, but do not fulfill their stated purpose as a voice for the 'common citizen' nor do they actively promote participation.