Democratization Civil Society and Democratic Governance The fundamental aspect of civil society is the voluntary participation of citizens in community life — both local and national — either directly or through organizations or institutions. The extent to which this participation is transparent and effective is a measure of the quality of democratic governance within a country. Over the past fifteen years, the ODIHR has sought to strengthen this participation in line with OSCE commitments on civil society. Since 2004, the ODIHR has taken a more comprehensive approach to strengthening democratic practices by developing and adopting an inclusive strategy characterized by working simultaneously with government institutions, civil society, and political structures. While this approach is taken in a range of activities across all sectors of the Office, the ODIHR has developed, more specifically, a methodology for strengthening democratic governance: building on the results of the 2004 Human Dimension Seminar on “Democratic Institutions and Democratic Governance”, governance is addressed by underpinning democratic practices, improving parliamentary practices, developing political parties, and by forming partnerships with think tanks. The Supplementary Human Dimension Meeting (SHDM) on “Democratization: Strengthening Democracy through Effective Representation”, held in November, highlighted this methodology and provided a valuable forum for discussing the results achieved, as well as an opportunity for aggregating important lessons learned, including from OSCE field operations. Discussions at the SHDM covered a number of aspects of democratic governance, including political representation, women’s participation, and legislative transparency. 32 Annual Report  Main Issues k Democratic culture: More than a decade of OSCE work in the area of democracy-building has underlined that democracy is more than institutions and laws. A true, functioning democracy also requires the compatibility of norms, rules, and traditions of a given society with a culture of seeking the common good through deliberation. It is only through such a culture of democracy that institutions will be able to function democratically both internally and in relation to one another. k Political representation: International democ- ratization programmes implemented in the OSCE region overall have mainly targeted two sectors: government institutions and NGOs. Political parties have been involved in a much less systematic manner, despite the evident problems of weak political actors with poor representativeness and accountability. Political parties need to be effective in order to ensure the proper functioning of legislative structures, a necessary precondition for inclusive democracy. Indeed, if political parties are to foster democratic governance effectively, they need to govern themselves democratically as well. k Parliamentary reform: Parliament is the dem- ocratic institution par excellence, where citizens’ opinions and government meet through the interaction of parties and factions, whether in opposition or in power. Institutional development of political parties and parliamentary reform are therefore two processes that should go hand-in-hand.