For six decades the civil society and democracy thesis has generated great interest. How dependably can the relationship of associational membership to democracy be demonstrated empirically? Using a data set derived from 37 national surveys in eight countries, this article finds that the questions used commonly to measure civil society are unreliable or simply measure different things, thereby imperiling the assumed universal and robust relationship between civil society membership and democracy. By emphasizing problems related to question wording, this article intends to prompt the profession to improve and standardize measurement of membership in civil society organizations to determine whether this tantalizing hypothesis has the powerful predictive value ascribed to it by the field of comparative politics.