No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Hands Off My Regime! Governments’ Restrictions on Foreign Aid to Non-Governmental Organizations in Poor and Middle-Income Countries
Abstract
Many resource-strapped developing country governments seek international aid, but when that assistance is channeled through domestic civil society, it can threaten their political control. As a result, in the last two decades, 39 of the world’s 153 low- and middle-income countries have adopted laws restricting the inflow of foreign aid to domestically operating nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Governments recognize that such laws harm their international reputations for supporting democracy and may invite donor punishment in terms of aid reductions. Yet, they perceive foreign aid to NGOs as supporting political opponents and threatening their grip on power. In the aftermath of competitive electoral victories, governments often take new legal steps to limit these groups’ funding. We test this argument on an original dataset of laws detailing the regulation of foreign aid inflows to domestically operating NGOs in 153 low- and middle-income countries for the period 1993–2012. Using an event history approach, we find that foreign aid flows are associated with an increased risk of restrictive law adoption; a log unit increase in foreign aid raises the probability of adoption by 6.7%. This risk is exacerbated after the holding of competitive elections: the interaction of foreign aid and competitive elections increases the probability of adoption by 11%.
Supplementary resource (1)
... Dependence on external donor funding by CSOs often leads to asymmetrical power relations, upward accountability, and loss of legitimacy as CSOs become closer to donors rather than their intended beneficiaries. This, in turn, can affect local ownership and organisational sustainability (Banks, Hulme, and Edwards 2015), while also offering arguments for some governments to impose restrictive regulations which seek to curtail the influence of CSOs and their access to external funding, and to limit political space in general (Dupuy, Ron, and Prakash 2016). Different labels have been ascribed to this phenomenon, such as "closing civic space", "shrinking civic space", and "closing civil society space" (Carothers and Brechenmacher 2015;Dupuy, Ron, and Prakash 2016;2015). ...
... This, in turn, can affect local ownership and organisational sustainability (Banks, Hulme, and Edwards 2015), while also offering arguments for some governments to impose restrictive regulations which seek to curtail the influence of CSOs and their access to external funding, and to limit political space in general (Dupuy, Ron, and Prakash 2016). Different labels have been ascribed to this phenomenon, such as "closing civic space", "shrinking civic space", and "closing civil society space" (Carothers and Brechenmacher 2015;Dupuy, Ron, and Prakash 2016;2015). there evidence of a connection between domestic resource mobilisation, CSOs' legitimacy, and civic space? ...
... The final question motivating our study is whether governments and political actors, who have a significant effect on civic space, show signs of receptiveness towards CSOs that have a clear local support base. A significant amount of literature highlights how CSOs' dependence on external funding has led to accusations that they undermine government powers and national interests (Dupuy, Ron, and Prakash 2016;2015). Particularly in politically restrictive contexts, foreign-funded CSOs are accused of serving foreign interests and undermining state sovereignty (Dupuy, Ron, and Prakash 2016;2015). ...
In response to political and funding pressures, civil society organisations (CSOs) in the Global South are seeking to generate more funding from local sources. This article explores whether domestic resource mobilisation can also open up civic space by reviewing the evidence on the relationship between domestic resource mobilisation and civic space in the Global South. This article adopts a scoping review methodology and follows a literature search and screening process
where 25 studies were synthesised. In addition, we draw on primary data from interviews with CSO representatives in Burkina Faso, India, Ethiopia, and Kenya to examine whether and how domestic resource mobilisation can improve the operating environment for civil society. We find that domestic resource mobilisation enhances CSOs’ legitimacy and credibility at the grassroots by increasing downward accountability, albeit with trade-offs. CSOs use domestic resource mobilisation as a
platform for engaging citizens and opening spaces for collective action, which increases civic participation and demands for social accountability. We further find that political actors are more receptive towards CSOs with a local base, although this receptiveness depends on the context and the functions of CSOs. Finally, we identify some potentially negative aspects of domestic resource mobilisation for civic space.
... This new approach to the regulation of civil society has attracted increasing attention from scholars, practitioners, and policy-makers alike (c.f. Lamarche, 2019;Chaudhry, 2022;Fransen et al., 2021;Bromley et al., 2020;Smidt et al., 2020;Bakke et al., 2020;Glasius et al., 2020;Poppe & Wolf, 2017;Dupuy et al., 2015Dupuy et al., , 2016Christensen & Weinstein, 2013). Recent examples include India's 2010 Foreign Contribution Act and Israel's 2016 NGO Transparency Law. ...
... We now have a fairly good understanding of which countries are adopting these legal measures as well as why they are doing so (Bromley et al., 2020;Chaudhry, 2022;Dupuy et al., 2016). More evidence continues to emerge about how civil society organizations try to adapt to and survive these regulations, and how various actors such as foreign aid donors and international institutions respond to and push back against these laws (Dupuy et al., 2015;Fransen et al., 2021). ...
... The now well-documented increase in the adoption of national regulations restricting the emergence, operations, funding sources, and exit of INGOs is part of a larger phenomenon of a state-initiated and sanctioned clampdown on formal civil society groups and funding sources aimed at promoting human rights and democracy (Dupuy et al., 2016). A recent useful and parsimonious example of a typology of restrictions adopted thus far is that of Christensen and Weinstein (2013), later updated by Glasius et al. (2020) (and largely followed by Chaudhry, 2022) (see Table 1). ...
Does the adoption of restrictive regulations shape numbers of non-governmental organizations? Since the late 1990s, governments around the world have been enacting new legal measures designed to suppress civil society’s functions and organizational space to carry out advocacy and politically oriented work. Scholars have investigated the impact of these new regulations on foreign aid flows, voting behavior, and on organizations, but to date, we lack a systematic analysis about the cross-national global effects of these legal restrictions on numbers of international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) in particular, since it is these organizations (and their funders) that have been heavily targeted. In this research note, we fill this gap through an empirical analysis of the effects of various types of restrictive laws on INGO numbers in 96 countries between 1992 and 2018 and find that advocacy restrictions result in a reduction of transnational human rights organizations but not numbers of INGOs.
... The women indigenous movements considered this measure discriminatory and infeasible for the organizations with scare resources with which they typically associate. Additionally, Dupuy et al. (2016) included Ecuador in the list of countries in which the president has the power to cease CSOs for political reasons. This arbitrary factor generated uncertainty in the context in which CSOs operate in Ecuador. ...
... NGOs)(Bloodgood, Tremblay-Boire, & Prakash, 2014;Dupuy, Ron, & Prakash, 2016).Across countries, different sets of regulations target NGOs. The degree and nature of regulations may be determined by political leaders' perceptions of whether NGOs players represent a threat to their political survival by changing the political order. ...
With the goal of improving effectiveness and efficiency, worldwide cross-sector collaboration has become a central governance arrangement. Given this trend, research has focused on illustrating examples of collaborations over time and/or identifying collaboration’s drivers and effects. Yet, as cross-sector collaborations are more prevalent, governments have changed the rules for civil society organizations to become part of cross-sector collaboration across policy domains. While some regulations can be seen as a precondition to start a collaboration, over-regulated contexts can become a burden for participating organizations, thus hindering collaboration sustainability. However, little knowledge exists as to how regulatory changes influence performance effects of cross-sector collaboration. To fill this gap, this research focuses on all the 2007-2018 Ecuadorian subnational partnerships that manage international cooperation to test whether adoption of further regulations or regulatory burden targeting civil society organizations compromises the amount of international aid subnational governments secure. We also expect that the economic diversity in a jurisdiction amplifies the performance effects of regulatory burden. Findings suggest that regulatory burden negatively influenced governance capacity to obtain international aid, particularly in jurisdictions with high economic diversity.
... These constraints on the civic space for cso s render the theory of civic space for cso s an illusion. The laws constraining the freedom of cso s target advocacy ngo s in particular (Dupuy, Ron, and Prakash 2016;Nguyahambi 2021). The types of advocacy engaged in by ngo s include defending democracy, human rights, governance, policy changes, environmental protection, immigrants' rights, and so forth. ...
... While ngo s' roles are established in the literature and appear to be well known, governments continue to create a legal and political environment that constrains the effective implementation of their roles (Musila 2019;Dupuy, Ron, and Prakash 2016). Governments seem to collaborate more with service-based than with advocacy-based ngo s, allowing service-based ngo s to enjoy their freedom while advocacy-based ngo s suffer (Nguyahambi 2021;Buyse 2018;Cheeseman and Dodsworth 2023). ...
The civic space is under attack globally and even more so in developing countries as a result of democratic recession. Civil society organizations are especially affected. However, the experience of advocacy non-governmental organizations ( NGO s) in the civic space has not been significantly explored. The aim of this study is twofold: to undertake a systematic review of the literature from developing countries using the PRISMA protocol; and to look at the experience of advocacy NGO s in the civic space in Tanzania. A thematic approach is used to analyze the primary data. The results confirm that advocacy NGO s are more affected and show that the nature of their advocacy determines their position in the civic space. In Tanzania, advocacy NGO s focusing on checking state power and advocating policy changes, good governance, and human rights are subject to more restrictions because of their criticism of the government.
... From theories of democracy (Putnam, 1993) to research on transnational advocacy networks (e.g., Brysk, 2013;Keck & Sikkink, 1998;Risse et al., 1999), there is a consensus that the presence of unrestricted civil society organizations (CSOs) is a key condition for the delivery of public goods, such as security provision, infrastructure development, or environmental conservation, and for the realization of the goals of the United Nations (UN). 1 At the same time, recent research shows that some governments seek to curtail CSO activities Christensen & Weinstein, 2013;Dupuy et al., 2016;Glasius et al., 2020). Figure 1 suggests that since 1994, governments have increased restrictions on civil society's human rights defenders, including burdensome registration requirements, limits on foreign funding, smear campaigns, and the censorship of reports. ...
... If compliance is a consequence of pressures by CSOs, and not something governments do anyway, then they may choose to restrict CSO activities to avoid the expected costs of noncompliance. Beyond the very visible step of all-out bannning CSOs, governments have, for example, limited foreign funding for domestic CSOs, revoked CSOs' official registration, refused visas to international CSOs, and surveilled and harassed activists and their families (Chaudhry & Heiss, 2022;Christensen & Weinstein, 2013;Dupuy et al., 2016;Glasius, 2018Glasius, , 2020. Theories of pluralist democracy, transnational advocacy, and compliance imply: if the presence of CSOs is associated with pressure to comply with international norms and provide public goods, then such government-sponsored restrictions on CSOs to reduce the pressure should serve as a red flag for governance failures. ...
Governments increasingly restrict civil society organizations (CSOs). Different theories converge on the expectation that CSOs are important for public goods. A largely unexplored implication is that increased restrictions on CSOs will signal the under‐delivery of public goods. Using data on government‐imposed restrictions on CSOs for a global sample of countries, we test this implication. Controlling for unobserved cross‐country heterogeneity, temporal shocks, and confounding variables, we find that the accumulation of restrictions on CSOs negatively correlate with public goods‐oriented government spending and positively correlate with corruption and clientelism in the future. Our evidence also suggests that the mechanism underpinning these findings is that persistent restrictions on CSOs negatively correlate with engaged society and, to some extent, protest. While global governance actors warn of the negative consequences of restrictions on CSOs, our analyses provide evidence that restrictions are indeed a red flag for governments' failure to live up to their public goods commitment.
... One important trait of shrinking/closing space is autocratic and autocratizing governments' legal-administrative intimidation (e.g., Christensen & Weinstein, 2013;Dupuy, Ron, & Prakash, 2016;Richter, 2018) that curtails civil society's freedoms and erodes human rights norms (Bakke, Mitchell, & Smidt, 2020). Specifically, the debate stresses the detrimental effects of laws that regulate the registration of local and international Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) or obstruct foreign funding to civil society (the socalled "NGO law") (Carothers & Brechenmacher, 2014, pp. ...
... Specifically, the debate stresses the detrimental effects of laws that regulate the registration of local and international Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) or obstruct foreign funding to civil society (the socalled "NGO law") (Carothers & Brechenmacher, 2014, pp. 9-10;Dupuy, Ron, & Prakash, 2016). Chaudhry (2022, pp. ...
This chapter examines the multifaceted relationships between civil society and autocratization. The third-wave democratization literature often conceives civil society as a crucial force for democratic transition and consolidation, and a buffer against autocratic encroachment. Based on this premise, autocratization dwindles the political space necessary for autonomous civil society. Studies on civil society’s ‘dark sides,’ however, show how autocrats can coopt and instrumentalize civil society for legitimizing their rule. Research on civil society coups and extremism additionally demonstrates that civic activism can directly contribute to democratic collapse and eroding democratic pluralism. Despite growing pessimism about civil society, nascent research on pushbacks against autocratization reminds us of the importance of civil society in stalling – if not reversing autocratization. The chapter suggests future research move beyond normative assumptions regarding civil society and autocratization, while broadening conceptual – if not epistemological – underpinnings to make the causal analysis more well-rounded.
... As a result, the international development activities of charitiesespecially addressing humanitarian criseshave become a growing focus of scholarly attention in development studies, international relations, and global social policy, more generally (Dreher et al., 2012;Clifford, 2016). However, a singular focus on international development obscures the broader array of countries of operation and social policy domains that charitable organisations engage in globally (Dupuy et al., 2016, Lewis, 2013. ...
... It focuses on charities registered with the respective regulator in each jurisdiction, and thus excludes certain forms of charities (e.g., some churches and chapels in England and Wales) and other nonprofit/voluntary/civil society organisations that operate internationally. The country-level covariates were carefully chosen based on prior empirical work (e.g., Clifford, 2016;Dupuy et al., 2016;Davis and Swiss, 2020) but can not be considered a complete list of relevant factors to the outcome. Relatedly, the cross-sectional research design precludes drawing causal interpretations from the findings. ...
Charities are long-established and increasingly prominent non-state actors in social policy. However, these organisations remain understudied within social policy research, particularly their presence in the delivery of global social policy. This paper provides new cross-national evidence about charities operating internationally. It makes use of a comprehensive administrative dataset covering the country of operation of every overseas charity registered in England and Wales, Australia, and Canada. The international connections of charities are extensive, and these organisations are much more likely to work in countries with shared colonial and linguistic ties, and less likely to work in those with poor governance or high levels of corruption. This paper goes beyond a binary focus on either “developing” or “developed” country contexts, and provides insight into the international connections of “non-elite” as well as “elite” social policy actors.
... At times states restrict civil society's ability to organize by imposing mandatory registration processes, restricting engagement in political advocacy, or by intimidating activists to limit mobilization. In other cases, states restrict foreign funding to weaken the domestic civil society (Christensen and Weinstein 2013;Dupuy et al. 2016;Wolf and Poppe 2015). ...
... Besides that, scholars argue that domestic factors play a key role in restrictions. As such, leaders facing domestic political challenges are more likely to engage in restricting civil society (Dupuy et al. 2016). ...
This paper asks the question of how preferential trade agreements affect civil society restrictions. It argues that preferential trade agreements reduce civil society restrictions. However, this relationship varies across different types of trade agreements. We test the hypotheses using a gravity model of trade by incorporating directed-dyads data on PTAs and civil society restrictions from 1948 to 2009. The results suggest a curvilinear relationship between preferential trade agreements and civil society restrictions. Moreover, it appears that countries signing in-depth trade agreements increase civil society participation compared to the ones signing shallow trade agreements.
... Growing interconnectedness of countries through the "diffusion of government policies" (Dreher, 2006(Dreher, : 1092 can either directly threaten the survival of national governments when these policies are perceived as incompatible with local institutions (Dupuy et al., 2016) or impose "sovereignty costs" (Copelovitch & Pevehouse, 2019) on the governments as that interconnectedness relocates some political decision-making authority away from them (Hiscox, 2003). The alignment with supranational organizations such as the World Trade Organization or the European Monetary Union constrains governments' options with regard to income redistribution, regulation of the industry, or provision of jobs (Hellwig, 2016). ...
Equal treatment of foreign and local firms is the cornerstone of international investment law. Yet, why do foreign firms face discrimination in host countries? We analyze this critical but underexplored aspect of the liability of foreignness in two stages. First, drawing on the insights from political science, we argue that the political ideology of the host government along the left-right spectrum drives discriminatory dynamics, resulting in elevated regulatory risk for foreign firms. Next, we argue that globalization moderates the relative regulatory risk while distinguishing political and social dimensions of globalization: political globalization amplifies the effect of ideology on discrimination, while social globalization mitigates it. We validate our theory using tax inspection data on 38,326 firms across 95 countries from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys between 2008 and 2019. We identify a novel, context-specific source of discrimination revealing how political ideology and globalization jointly shape the regulatory risk of foreign firms. We advance a growing stream of research that explores how political ideologies shape international business. CEOs must recognize that political ideology can drive discrimination risk and that globalization is a double-edged sword. Strategic planning demands nuanced integration of both factors to successfully mitigate discrimination in international markets.
... This period also saw an increase in support from international development agencies and Western states for CSOs to propagate and entrench liberal norms and democratic principles and to influence the socio-political developments of poorer countries in the Global South and former Communist states. These supports led to the mushrooming of CSOs in these regions (Dupuy et al., 2016). A build-up of events led to an associational decline in the late 1990s. ...
After more than 20 years of research, it is well established thatstates used counter-terrorism measures (CTMs) to close civicspaces for civil society under the pretext of curbing terrorism.However, the specific mechanisms by which these occur, or theresponses of civil society organizations (CSOs), remain hard tograsp. Furthermore, scholars are yet to fully understand themotivations for states’ repression of CSOs, including whether it ispossible that states overreacted to terrorism threats andresponded sincerely but disproportionately or that they haveanother agenda. Do some countries that do not face genuinethreats cynically follow others? How do we measure theunintended consequences for CSOs, including those engaged innon-politically sensitive issues? Furthermore, while CSOs haveeither resisted, remained silent, or complied with CTMs bymoving away from political activism, how does stateimplementation of CTMs lead CSOs to change their structures,spaces, and actors as adaption strategies, and what are the long-term consequences for democracy, rights and accountability?What drives some CSOs to adopt one set of responses whileothers choose a different approach? The present article presentsthe first systematic literature review of 83 relevant sources. Indoing so, key themes on the tactics of states and the responsesof CSOs are examined. From this, we conclude and makesuggestions for future research.
... Hsu, 2010;Salamon & Toepler, 2015). The list of issues discussed in the literature can further be extended to the question of external linkage of civil society actors (Bromley et al., 2020;Dupuy et al., 2016;Hellmeier, 2020;Kourtikakis & Turkina, 2015;Moser & Skripchenko, 2018;Pallas & Sidel, 2020;Petrova, 2014;Sidel, 2019;Swedlund, 2017;Zihnioğlu, 2019d), internal fragmentations both within civil society (D'Alisa et al., 2013;Falkenhain, 2020;Freizer, 2004;Hahn-Fuhr & Worschech, 2014;Popplewell, 2018) and the state (Y. Kang, 2019;Li, 2020;Mertha, 2009;Spires, 2011b;Wu & Chan, 2012), civil society's participation in the distribution of resources (Alqatabry & Butcher, 2020;Bernhard & Jung, 2017;Muok & Kingiri, 2015;Pelke, 2020;Taka & Northey, 2020), the organising form, organisation and institutionalisation of civil society (Aliyev, 2015a;Bródy, 2023;Harris & Milofsky, 2019;Kārkliņa, 2014;Richter & Hatch, 2013;Sommerfeldt & Kent, 2015;Urinboyev & Eraliev, 2022), the role of leadership within civil society organisations (Bilgin et al., 2017;Hildebrandt, 2013;Tai, 2015;J. ...
This dissertation investigates the dynamics of civil society within authoritarian regimes, challenging the dominance of normative frameworks that assess civil society against democratic ideals. Rejecting the prevalent analytical strategy, which relies on thickly normative comparisons of cases at hand to ideal benchmarks, the study adopts positive theorising to uncover how civil society organisations (CSOs) their autonomy. Building on the symbiosis perspective, one of four bottom-up perspectives identified in the literature (the others being conflictual, cooperative adjustment, and co-optative joinder), the study examines the role of formal institutionalisation in shaping CSO autonomy, understood as the strategic balancing of transnational ties and ties to the state and operationalised across financial and institutional dimensions. The empirical analysis is based on original survey data from CSOs in Russia and Turkey, representing hardliner and moderate autocracies, respectively. Findings reveal a “diffused effect” of formal institutionalisation: while aspects like professionalisation and formal commitment enhance institutional autonomy, rationalisation and bureaucratisation, unlike hierarchy, may constrain financial autonomy. In turn, formal commitment is determined by bureaucratisation and hierarchy. These effects are further moderated by the intensity of authoritarian rule – the regime variable. By bridging macro-level civil sphere theory with micro-level organisational analysis, the dissertation provides a fresh perspective on how CSOs manage interdependencies under authoritarian conditions. Overall, it critiques the over-reliance on normative judgments and descriptive inference in existing research and advocates for theory-driven, empirically testable explanations. In doing so, it advances an organisational theory of civil society that highlights the internal dynamics of CSOs and their interactions with broader societal structures.
... Autocratic governments assert control over civil society, and limit the activities of (international) NGOs (A. Cunningham 2018;Dupuy et al. 2016;Heurlin 2010). This once again presents aid agencies with the challenge of how they can stay neutral and impartial when increasingly autocratic governments stand in their way. ...
What happens when humanitarian crises are managed by autocratic governments in politicized contexts? This article gives a critical reflection on the 2023 earthquake emergency response in Türkiye. Our study is based on fieldwork interviews and participant observations during the earthquake response. The earthquake shook the country a few months before a contested presidential election. Combining explanations from regime survival theories and disaster policies, we show how elected autocracies strategically contain and co-opt international disaster response mechanisms to reinforce their authority and legitimacy. Yet, international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) can maintain access to such a nationalized response through their financial superiority. We conceptualize the outcome of this nationalized earthquake response as an autocratic aid allocation funnel: a discriminatory aid distribution mechanism favoring the government’s core voter base while marginalizing minorities who lack voting rights. This demonstrates how electoral autocracies use emergencies to strengthen their power. International organizations face a dilemma: whether to provide much-needed aid while potentially becoming complicit in a regime’s unequal and politically motivated disaster response. The case shows how autocratic governments manipulate crises for political gain and exacerbate the vulnerabilities of minorities.
... Civil society organizations (CSOs), encompassing formally organized, nonprofit, non-governmental voluntary groups, have long been exposed to a diversity of legal constraints (Bloodgood, Tremblay-Boire, and Prakash 2014;Bolleyer 2018;DeMattee 2019). Yet over the last decade concerns have been growing that government restrictions increasingly curtail CSOs' capacity to function and perform key tasks (Glasius, Schalk, and De Lange 2020;Chaudhry and Heiss 2022), a concern initially associated with authoritarian and hybrid regimes (Dupuy, Ron, and Prakash 2016;Toepler et al. 2020;Bromley, Schofer, and Longhofer 2020). By now, CSO restrictions have been put in place in many consolidated democracies (Swiney 2022;Bolleyer 2022;Chaudhry 2022;Simsa 2022), some of which might be rationalized by governments' endeavor to fight "bad," that is anti-democratic or illiberal, parts of civil society (Sivenbring and Malmros 2023). ...
Liberal democracies increasingly restrict civil society organizations (CSOs), a trend frequently linked to illiberal governments. But when do ideologically liberal governments resort to such restrictions? Linking research on state traditions, party ideology and crisis governance, we theorize factors enhancing liberal governments' propensity to adopt normatively contentious CSO restrictions. Distinguishing formal‐legal restrictions on CSO voice from those on CSO existence, we show that nearly 90 such restrictions were adopted by 17 cabinets in France and the United Kingdom over the last 2 decades. In line with theoretical expectations, restrictions on CSO existence are more prominent in statist France, while governments in the United Kingdom tend to restrict CSO voice. More right‐wing governments adopt more CSO restrictions, while restrictions go up with government crisis pressure. Overall, understanding how liberal governments use CSO restrictions requires considering contextual opportunity structures and ideological dispositions in conjunction.
... Autocratic governments assert control over civil society, and limit the activities of (international) NGOs (A. Cunningham, 2018;Dupuy et al., 2016;Heurlin, 2010). This once again presents aid agencies with the challenge of how they can stay neutral and impartial when increasingly autocratic governments stand in their way. ...
What happens when autocratic governments manage humanitarian crises in politicized contexts? This article critically reflects on the 2023 earthquake emergency response in Türkiye. Our study is based on fieldwork interviews and participant observations during the earthquake response. The earthquake shook the country a few months before a contested presidential election. Combining explanations from regime survival theories and disaster policies, we show how elected autocracies strategically contain and co-opt international disaster response mechanisms to reinforce their authority and legitimacy. Yet, international NGOs can maintain access to such a nationalized response through their financial superiority. We conceptualize the outcome of this nationalized earthquake response as an autocratic aid allocation funnel: a discriminatory aid distribution mechanism favoring the government's core voter base while marginalizing minorities who lack voting rights. This demonstrates how electoral autocracies exploit emergencies to consolidate power, using crises as opportunities to enhance their authority while exacerbating inequalities. International organizations face a dilemma: whether to provide much-needed aid while potentially becoming complicit in a regime's unequal and politically motivated disaster response. The case highlights how autocratic governments manipulate crises for political gain, further marginalizing vulnerable minority populations.
... The varying levels of legitimacy support demonstrate the complexity of organizational recognition (Taylor 1992). Institutional legitimacy denotes the alignment of SEs' operations with public policy objectives, thereby enabling them to obtain recognition from various governmental functions and levels and facilitating access to political, administrative, and legal support (Kang 1997;Dupuy, Ron, and Prakash 2016;Ding 2018;Gao 2000;Scott 2014). Industry legitimacy is defined as the endorsement of SEs' objectives and performance by key ...
Social enterprises (SEs) play a pivotal role in addressing the shortcomings of government, business, and the third sector. However, SEs operating in developing countries face a different environment than their counterparts in developed societies due to immature institutional environments. This necessitates the examination of alternative pathways to organizational legitimacy. Through a comparative analysis of two Chinese microfinance social enterprises (MSEs), this article examines how these organizations navigate the complexities of legitimacy within their operating environments. Drawing on the stakeholder perspective and the legitimacy literature, this article proposes that the survival and expansion of SEs in developing countries depend on achieving a hybrid legitimacy encompassing institutional, industry, and market dimensions. The proactive strategies adopted by the two MSEs, such as forging strategic alliances with local authorities, engaging in industry-recognized reputational activities, and cultivating markets through philanthropic efforts, are instrumental in securing key stakeholders' support and resources. These legitimacy-building efforts are critical to the survival of SEs and essential to achieving their dual mandate of financial sustainability and social impact. This article adds to the existing body of knowledge by delineating the multiple sources of legitimacy that are relevant to SEs in developing countries, using China as an example. It also highlights the different outcomes of institutionalist versus strategic approaches to legitimacy-seeking, enriching both academic and practical understandings of SE resilience and growth.
... Scholars note that civil society organizations relying on funds from larger institutional donors such as government entities, large foundations, and corporations, tend to act on donor priorities as opposed to the priorities of the constituents that they are expected to serve [35]. Indeed, governments cracking down on civil society point out that these organizations receive much of their funding from foreign sources as justification for such crackdowns [36]. Further, experimental evidence suggests that donors prefer to give to privately funded organizations rather than those funded by the government [37,38]. ...
Is the UK public willing to financially support environmental organizations that adopt disruptive tactics (museum and art gallery protests, sporting event disruptions, and traffic stoppages), as opposed to orthodox tactics (litigation, lobbying, and research and education)? Using a conjoint choice experiment (N = 1,023; Nobs = 10,230), we asked respondents’ willingness to donate £25 to hypothetical environmental organizations that differ in terms of (1) advocacy tactics, (2) expenditure on administrative overheads, (3) representation of women on their boards, (4) organizational age, (5) organizational size, (6) number of volunteers, and (7) revenue from citizen donations. We find respondents’ willingness to donate diminishes when organizations adopt disruptive tactics. These results hold across party preferences, ideology, generation, location, and environmental policy attitudes. Further, respondents are willing to donate to organizations that rely on donations from the general public, have low overheads, are supported by volunteer labor, and provide representation to women on their boards.
... As such, civil society is viewed as a sphere of resistance typically involved in human rights activities, election monitoring and holding the state to account -an engaged society quite different from passive citizens under the Soviet regime. From this perspective, civil society can undermine state authority, political power and regime legitimacy (Dupuy, Ron, and Prakash 2016). Autocracies use repression, coercion, co-optation and containment to stymie mobilized dissent and ultimately foster political stability. ...
... Although governments in recipient countries, particularly in low-or middle-income countries appreciate and welcome foreign aid (Dupuy, Ron, and Prakash 2016), their domestic oppositions may not be on the same page. This is because politicians from oppositions who are campaigning for power are engaged in blaming the incumbent governments and its individual officeholders (Weaver 1986). ...
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, China extended significant medical aid to international communities, aiming to combat the virus's spread and foster global solidarity. However, despite the appreciation expressed by recipient governments for China's assistance, the general public's perception of China did not significantly improve. This prompts the question: why did China's COVID-19 health diplomacy fail to resonate with foreign audiences? This article delves into the cases of Thailand and the Philippines to argue that public perceptions of countries providing aid can be heavily influenced by domestic political dynamics, particularly when incumbent governments already face legitimacy challenges prior to aid delivery. By scrutinizing the implementation of China's aid and the state-to-state relations between China and incumbent governments, political opposition forces can exploit any shortcomings or missteps, placing blame squarely on the incumbents. Given the existing distrust toward incumbent governments, the public is more inclined to accept messages propagated by opposition groups, thereby hindering any positive shift in perception toward China. This perspective complements existing research that predominantly focuses on the diplomatic strategies of donor countries, suggesting instead that the domestic politics of host countries play a pivotal role in shaping the effectiveness of foreign nations' efforts to cultivate favorable images among foreign audiences.
... Carnegie & Dolan, 2021), aid suspension by donors (Mertens, 2024; including a 2024 Special Issue, see : Cheeseman et al, 2024) and governments restricting international aid flows to domestic organisations (e.g. Cochrane & Birhanu, 2019;Dupuy et al, 2016). These studies have focused on the reputation of governments (of rejecting or restricting), which inform this study that refusal can seek to protect reputation (e.g. ...
NGOs are perceived as organisations that are always seeking funding. However, there are many instances where donations are refused by NGOs. This counter-intuitive decision, given the often grave humanitarian needs, is not well documented beyond brief references or individual cases. Refusal is an expression of values and principles, important for actors that are often portrayed as having little to no agency or power in relation to donors. We developed a database of 32 examples of funding refusals by NGOs detailing the reasons for refusal. To classify and compare the refusals, we developed a preliminary typology of NGO motivations for donor refusal, which contains four types (independence, impartiality, neutrality, and humanity) that align with humanitarian principles. Each category and type are defined and examples of each are provided. Given the focal nature of NGOs in development activity, the lack of attention to funding refusal is notable. We address this lacuna by creating a database and developing a preliminary typology to provide a foundation for future research. This study contributes a novel typology to an under-studied topic. In so doing, this paper provides a foundation for studies of refusal to follow.
... By relying on external assistance, governments may feel pressured to conform to the interests and agendas of the donor countries, which could undermine their sovereignty and autonomy in decision-making processes. Regarding development aid, for instance, Dupuy et al. (2016) note that since the 1990s, more than 30 low-and middle-income countries have legislated laws that prohibit foreign aid to domestic non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Although those states are arguably in dire need of development assistance, incumbents worry that aid to domestic NGOs over which they wield little power could enable the political opposition to garner support. ...
How do citizens respond to their government’s decision to accept or reject foreign assistance in the face of a natural disaster? While the increased frequency and intensity of natural disasters necessitate international cooperation for effective response, there have been numerous instances where states have declined foreign assistance offers due to reputation concerns. In this article, we focus on the domestic audience dynamics of such behavior. Drawing on experimental survey data from Turkey and India, two middle-income countries with geopolitical ambitions and recent experience in refusing foreign assistance, we find that accepting foreign assistance during natural disasters leads to higher evaluations of government performance, though this positive effect is driven by opposition voters only. Incumbent voters, conversely, solidify their support for the government regardless of its decision toward foreign assistance. The domestic political effects of government decisions in response to aid offers are largely independent of the identity of the country offering assistance.
... Even though women's participation in civil society can make differences, the influence of the participation can be limited without supports from decisionmakers. Given that some studies find that the clout of civil society actors in determining government policies addressing conflicts is not always conspicuous due to the lack of decision-making authority (Carothers & Samet-Marram, 2015;Dupuy et al., 2016;Poppe & Wolff, 2017), the presence of representatives with a similar policy direction is essential for women's participation in civil society to encourage peace building. The improved women's descriptive representation in legislative branches make the voice from peace-oriented female civil society participants be more likely to be reflected in government policies. ...
Do improved women’s descriptive representation in legislative branches and women’s participation in civil society decrease the intensity of civil conflicts? Is the impact of women’s presence in legislative branches on the conflict intensity magnified by women’s participation in civil society, and vice versa? In this study, we aim to expand the constructivist argument that equal gender roles in politics and civil society can bring about less intensive internal armed conflicts. Relying on time-series cross-national data on 151 countries from 1960 to 2016, we demonstrate that the increases in women’s descriptive representation in parliaments and women’s participation in civil society tend to decrease the predicted civil conflict intensity. In addition, we demonstrate that the deterrent effect of women’s descriptive representation is magnified by women’s participation in civil society and vice versa. These findings remain consistent in alternative model specifications with additional women-related control variables.
... Therefore, SEs are considered 'hybrid', as they create social and financial value. This yields several chances like independence from donors' good will or political influence (Dupuy, Ron, and Prakash 2016) and numerous SE lockdowns and (ii) potential changes comparing two successive lockdowns. We do so by combining qualitative (content analysis) and quantitative (Kruskal Wallis tests and linear mixed models) methodologies in a mixed methods approach analysing Facebook data of 121 German SEs. ...
During COVID-19 pandemic, lockdowns were imposed to contain infections. For social enterprises (SEs), that apply entrepreneurial means to fulfil their social missions, research suggests lockdown-related chances and risks. However, no insights on SE stakeholder communication facing COVID-19-induced lockdowns exist. Our work investigates SEs' communicational framings for two successive lockdowns based on 121 German SEs. Analysing Facebook data with a mixed methods approach, we show that, after both lockdowns, chance-oriented framings dominated. However, they decreased after the second lockdown. Despite a limited generalisability and a potential positivity bias in our data, we offer notable insights regarding SE stakeholder crisis communication.
... For example, the number of liberal democracies in the world has been falling for several decades (Kurlantzick 2013), and there is a rollback of rights for LGTBQ + groups and women Velasco 2023). Restrictions against civil society organisations are also on the rise (Bromley, Schofer, and Longhofer 2020;Dupuy, Ron, and Prakash 2016). At the same time, wider administrative and managerial trends are also in flux. ...
... In fact, the work on illiberal democracy highlights that democratic elections can coincide with closing civic space in order to justify the ideological stances of a ruling party (Zakaria, 1997). The legal system is the most effective way to reduce this civic space by imposing mandatory, burdensome registration requirements for civil society organizations (CSOs) on a regular basis that act as a form of surveillance, finance laws that limit CSO access to foreign funding, and selectively enforcing the law to fine, arrest, or threaten advocacy groups that advance messages anathema to the state (Christensen & Weinstein, 2013;Dupuy et al., 2016;Glasius et al., 2020). ...
What constitutes an enabling environment for nutrition advocacy in low- and middle-income countries? While a sizeable body of scholarship considers the enabling environment for nutrition policy, we focus specifically on the necessary conditions for advocacy. We argue that three factors—voice, access, and ownership—provide a useful lens into the advocacy enabling environment. These are operationalized, respectively, as the space to articulate and frame policy positions, entry points to interact with policy decision makers, and the existence of committed decision makers rather than those responding to pressures from external actors. These three factors are explored vis-à-vis a comparative analysis of two federal democracies—India and Nigeria—that each have vibrant advocacy communities confronting persistent malnutrition. Drawing on more than 100 structured interviews with nutrition advocates, government actors, donors, and researchers in the two countries, we highlight the ways in which voice, access, and ownership interactively shape advocacy efforts. In doing so, we find that Nigeria has a less ideological approach to certain nutrition issues than in India but also perceived to be more beholden to external actors in defining its nutrition actions. Recent restrictions on freedom of speech and association shrunk the civic space in India but these were less problematic in Nigeria. In both countries, the multi-tiered, multi-party system offers many different points of access into the policy arena, with sometimes negative implications for coordination. Overall, the paper contributes more broadly to the literature on enabling environments by highlighting potential indicators to guide nutrition advocates in other settings.
... Other methods, such as fixed effects panel regression analysis, co-integration regression techniques (DFGLS) and difference-in-differences analysis have been used in the literature to analyse the effect of aid (Cai et al., 2018;Dupuy et al., 2016;Minasyan et al., 2017;Nowak-Lehmann et al., 2012). Nevertheless, the VAR model is preferred because it can better control for simultaneity by endogenizing all the variables. ...
Capital inflows, such as foreign aid, can serve as a means to enhance infrastructure development in developing countries. This suggests that foreign aid might have an impact on the level of industrialization in African nations. While existing studies indicate that foreign aid can affect the competitiveness of the manufacturing sector by appreciating the real exchange rate, the veracity of this claim relies on empirical evidence. This paper explores the influence of aid on manufacturing value added using time-series data spanning from 1990 to 2018 for 27 African countries. Employing a panel vector autoregression technique and generating associated impulse response functions, the study scrutinizes the interactions between foreign aid and manufacturing. The analysis is conducted on both the full dataset and subsamples disaggregated based on the income levels of countries. The results indicate that foreign aid acts as a stimulus for manufacturing, primarily through a sustained depreciation of the real exchange rate. This finding holds true for both the overall dataset and the subset of low-income countries. The study attributes this phenomenon to the strategic utilization of aid to enhance infrastructure, leading to a reduction in the price of non-tradables relative to tradables. Consequently, this enhances the profitability and output capacity of the manufacturing sector in African countries. In essence, the results suggest that foreign aid plays a role in influencing or stimulating industrialization in African countries. The study concludes with a discussion on the implications of these findings for industrial policy in African nations.
... One body of scholarship examines the causes and consequences of governments' efforts to stifle the activity of NGOs, especially those that draw on foreign funds. Since the early 1990s, Western countries and multilateral organizations have funded and supported NGOs worldwide, and various studies explain why governments pushed back against these organizations (Bromley et al., 2020;Dupuy et al., 2016;Dupuy and Prakash, 2022;Heinzel and Koenig-Archibugi, 2023;Smidt et al., 2021). Since restrictions on NGOs occur primarily under autocratic or hybrid regimes (Glasius et al., 2020: 453), democracies that crack down on NGOs have received less attention in this literature. ...
In a backsliding democracy, antidemocratic politicians often vilify nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and impose restrictions that make it harder for them to form, advocate, or obtain funding. Do citizens consider NGOs as a threat? Do they support regulatory measures to restrict NGO activities? We focus on two factors that may influence citizens’ attitudes toward NGOs: these groups’ reliance on foreign funding and their ideological leaning. In a preregistered survey experiment in Israel, we find that citizens perceive foreign-funded NGOs as slightly more threatening, but they are not more likely to support restrictions on these groups than on groups relying on local funding. The ideological bent of the NGOs has a much stronger effect: People perceive NGOs on the other side of the political aisle as more threatening and support restrictions on their activity. Antidemocratic leaders might exploit this type of partisan-motivated reasoning to silence civil society.
... Not only are government officials unlikely to let go of a tool for influencing other governments, but some recipient countries prefer to restrict foreign to public channels. These governments view private aid as a politically destabilizing force and legally restrict these groups' funding (Dupuy et al. 2016). All of which suggests that Mazzucato's first principle is unlikely to hold in light of our public choice argument. ...
Mariana Mazzucato argues that capitalism needs to be rebuilt around private-public partnered “missions.” To facilitate these missions, Mazzucato provides seven pillars to serve as guidelines. Using Mazzucato’s pillars, we critically review US government efforts to develop the local economy and establish new political institutions through foreign aid. We analyze the successfulness of these “missions” by assessing government officials’ ability to overcome the “knowledge problem” and “political economy problems.” We conclude that Mazzucato’s pillars are unlikely to be satisfied due to these dual problems.
... Given the universalism of liberal principles, international organizations might be particularly negatively affected if illiberal culture takes center stage; indeed, recent research shows a decline in founding rates of international nonprofits in the US (Bush & Hadden, 2019). Cross-nationally, a liberal backlash may threaten nonprofit sectors; already, countries around the world are placing more restrictions on establishing and financing formal nonprofit organizations, especially regarding the receipt of foreign funding (Bromley et al., 2020;Dupuy et al., 2016). ...
What is the nonprofit sector and why does it exist? Collecting the writing of some of the most creative minds in the field of nonprofit studies, this book challenges our traditional understanding of the role and purpose of the nonprofit sector. It reflects on the ways in which new cultural and economic shifts bring existing assumptions into question and offers new conceptualizations of the nonprofit sector that will inform, provoke, and inspire. Nonprofit organization and activity is an enormously important part of social, cultural, and economic life around the world, but our conceptualization of their place in modern society is far from complete. Reimagining Nonprofits provides fresh insights that are necessary for understanding nonprofit organizations and sectors in the 21st century.
... Restrictions on (some) civil society actors need to be seen in the context of a global shift away from the valorization of civil society that characterized global public discourse in the 1990s and 2000. Across contexts, there has been a marked rise in the delegitimization of and hostility towards as well as legal and extra-legal constraints on liberal, progressive, human rights-oriented civil society groups, notably those with Western support and funding (Hossain et al. 2018;Carothers and Brechenmacher 2014;Biekart, Kontinen, and Millstein 2023;Dupuy, Ron, and Prakash 2016). In Bangladesh as elsewhere, these restrictions have included the introduction of new legal and administrative restrictions, particularly relating to funding and free speech. ...
David Lewis and I have been reflecting on the much-vaunted role of civil society and NGOs in Bangladesh's development and governance process. We would be really interested in feedback on where we have got to so far, including a) whether we are missing any of the big debates or issues; b) literature we should have included; and c) our analysis of these issues. Many thanks!
... Providing aid directly to governments equips them with more control over the allocation and branding of aid projects (Harding & Stasavage, 2014). Bypass aid, in contrast, might threaten political control of host country governments by supporting political opponents, which is one reason why many developing country governments have imposed legal restrictions on foreign aid inflows in the past two decades (Dupuy et al., 2016). By decreasing host country government control over incoming aid projects, bypass aid may also implicitly send weaker signals of political support from the donor to host government, dampening expectations of reciprocity in the form of a policy concession or other political support (Mauss, 1967;Hattori, 2001). ...
When do members of the public support outgoing foreign aid? Existing research often focuses on individual and sociotropic sources of support based on economic, ideological, and emotional considerations. This article examines a potentially under-appreciated source of attitudes toward outgoing aid: foreign policy influence for one’s country. I argue that observers can make intuitive associations between different types of aid and different influence outcomes, and that the prospect of influence will generally increase support for outgoing aid. To test these claims, I conduct parallel survey experiments in the two largest donor and lender countries, the United States and China. I find that an aid project’s mode of delivery and degree of visibility affect its perceived value for influence-seeking, and that respondents understand and generally support the use of aid for influence. While direct aid to governments does not appear to increase support, project visibility does, and support is particularly high for visible aid provided directly to host country governments. The findings contribute to existing international relations and political economy research on aid and public opinion, international influence, and Chinese development finance.
... The increased attention to autocratic legalism is also driven by the troubling proliferation of controversial new laws and judicial bodies in contemporary authoritarian settings. Thus, over the past decade we have witnessed a proliferation of new laws that regulate the right to protest (Goodfellow 2014), the funding of NGOs (Dupuy, Ron, and Prakash 2016), and the use of cyberspace (Frantz, Kendall-Taylor, and Wright 2020). ...
Authoritarian regimes regularly turn to the law to justify repression. This article examines whether invoking legal institutions has a persuasive effect on public perceptions of repression, and whether that effect is shaped by partisanship. The article uses the case of Cameroon’s Special Criminal Tribunal, created in 2011 to prosecute high-profile corruption cases. A survey experiment was designed that describes the arrest and trial of a suspected corrupt oppositional minister and reminds a treatment group about the Special Criminal Tribunal. The results show that neither regime nor opposition partisans are swayed by legal justifications for repression. By contrast, nonpartisans respond negatively to autocratic legalism, particularly those with low levels of regime trust. The article clarifies when autocratic legalism might be used for public legitimation, suggests that partisanship is a useful lens for understanding public opinion in an autocracy, and elaborates upon the meaning of nonpartisanship in electoral authoritarian regimes.
... Other governments may impose restrictive legal frameworks on INGOs, blocking their activities and forcing onerous legal restrictions on them. Unfortunately, often these restrictive states are also those exhibiting the greatest need for INGO aid, suffering on average from higher levels of poverty and being some of the most vulnerable to instability (Christensen and Weinstein 2013;Dupuy, Ron, and Prakash 2016). ...
This article examines how foreign aid professionalized Serbia's civil society sector and analyzes how Serbian NGOs navigate upward accountability to donors and downward accountability to grassroots communities. Drawing upon 11 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Serbia, I demonstrate how the administrative bureaucracies of foreign aid constructed a sector of managerial NGOs that are relatively removed from local communities. Nonetheless, I suggest that the staff members of NGOs are mission‐driven and mission‐oriented, and I unveil the strategies they use to support social change at grassroots levels. Arguing that NGOs are neither the schools of democracy envisioned by neo‐Tocquevillian theories of civil society, nor the lucrative industries portrayed by critical theories of civil society, I suggest that NGOs are best understood as bridges between foreign donors and grassroots communities. I reflect on the implications of these arguments for donors' aid localization strategies.
This research investigates the impact of international funding on strengthening civil society organizations in post-Soviet states, focusing on the Commonwealth of Independent States member countries. The project utilizes multi-level hierarchical models comparing the impact of funding within the same country throughout its independence from the Soviet Union over time (“within” effects) as well as to other countries included in the study (“between” effects). The paper makes both empirical and theoretical contributions to the field of civil society studies: empirically, it finds a negative relationship between the availability of funding and the strength of NGO-based civil society. These results hold for most of the other funding recipient countries across the globe for the same period. Theoretically, such a counter-intuitive finding suggests the ineffectiveness of exporting a civil society development model based on the Western experience to non-Western countries with repressive regimes.
Over the last two decades, governments have increasingly been adopting legislative measures that limit civil society and human rights organizations. While several studies explored the response of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in nondemocratic regimes to such measures, the literature on the response of NGOs in liberal democracies remains scarce. We examine this by analyzing the case of Israel. We conducted in-depth interviews with 30 position holders in 13 human rights NGOs, as well as lengthy ethnographic participant observations in two of these organizations. Our findings show that organizational responses varied significantly, ranging from minor to very significant changes. Furthermore, the direction of these changes was not uniform. While some organizations chose to intensify and radicalize their message, others preferred to depoliticize and appease domestic audiences. We reflect on the possible drivers of such strategic organizational differences and discuss the more general effects of repressive legislation in liberal democracies.
In an effort to understand the interactions between economic growth, population density, the Human Development Index (HDI), and the Environmental Quality Index (EQI) in Indonesia, this study adopts a quantitative approach utilizing panel data encompassing 34 provinces during the period from 2020 to 2022. This analysis implements fixed effects models in panel data regression to isolate the impact of these variables on environmental quality. Results indicate that neither economic growth nor population density significantly affect the EQI, while an increase in HDI significantly contributes to environmental improvement, emphasizing the importance of factors such as education, health, and living standards. Furthermore, the cross-section fixed effects analysis reveals significant provincial-specific factors influencing the EQI, which macroeconomic and demographic variables cannot fully explain. Variability among provinces shows that some have a strong positive effect on the EQI, whereas others have a negative impact, highlighting the need for regionally tailored policies to enhance effectiveness in environmental conservation efforts. These findings inform policymakers about the importance of focusing on human development as a key element in strategies to improve environmental quality in Indonesia. The implications suggest that sustainable development strategies must integrate aspects of human development with comprehensive environmental policies, creating synergies that support environmental preservation. This study makes a significant contribution to the literature by providing insights into effective ways that Indonesia can adopt to address current and future environmental challenges.
The Iraqi economy has gone through a lot of challenges, difficulties, problems, wars and the collapse of infrastructure and these conditions led to the occurrence of the fiscal deficit in Iraq, especially after 2003, as the financial deficit was financed by public debt and we will focus here in this research on the analysis and study of the public budget deficit and public debt in Iraq through the use of the analytical approach of data to analyze the data of the public budget deficit on the public debt in Iraq The research has found that the increase The fiscal deficit in the public budget increases dependence on public debt in order to finance that deficit and this means bearing large financial burdens because the public debt has burdens and financial problems added to the public budget as the research recommends the need to adopt a well-studied and appropriate economic policy in order to reduce the deficit in the public budget first and adopt a well-thought-out policy to manage the public debt in order to reduce its burdens and problems second, As well as avoiding financial crises that negatively affect the reality of the Iraqi economy.
Civil society inclusion in peace processes has many positive externalities, but does inclusion lead to improved rights for civil society actors themselves? We theorize how civil society actors leverage peace processes to secure state commitments to an improved advocacy environment after conflict. Using new data on civil society participation in peace negotiations (1990–2020), we show that participation significantly increases the likelihood of a provision formalizing these actors’ procedural rights in the resulting peace agreement. This relationship is conditional on relatively low pre-agreement repression of civil society, suggesting a minimal threshold of freedoms for effective advocacy during negotiations. Civil society actors in conflict settings may allocate scarce advocacy resources to secure procedural protections of their post-conflict survival, not only principled outcomes. Our findings suggest a possible mechanism allowing civil society to influence longer-term policy outcomes after conflict.
Global trends show that the civic space is shrinking. Specifically, civic space for Civil Society Organizations draws more attention. The shrinkage is caused by increased authoritarianism and democratic backsliding. Experience shows that advocacy based Non‐Governmental Organizations (NGOs) are more affected. The situation in Tanzania is comparable to other parts of the world. However, literature in Tanzania does not establish experiences to characterize the civic space of advocacy NGOs and does not explore the effects of existing civic space on advocacy NGOs. Drawing on Tanzania, this study examines NGOs experience and the effects of civic space on their roles. This study is anchored in interpretivism and case studies, following a qualitative path. Four NGOs and 10 activists were included. Interviews and documentary reviews were used to collect data, and a thematic approach was used to analyse the data. The findings reveal that the civic spaces for advocacy NGOs is changing, unpredictable and contested. There has been negative and positive experiences due to change of political regimes. This causes advocacy NGOs to fail to have long‐term plans, increased fear, loose focus and fail to emerge as strong democratic institutions. NGOs must push for, and the government should accept constitutional, and legal changes to ensure NGOs effective functioning. This specific focus could be extended to other parts of Africa, Asia and Europe, where advocacy NGOs face the same challenges.
Balancing the state and the market, the “third pillar” (i.e., any association of people that is neither public nor private) is a key sector in society. In contrast to the first two pillars (the public sector and the private sector), the third pillar has received very little attention in academic and policy debates. This paper aims to facilitate research on the third pillar's relevance by constructing the first global dataset on the size of the third pillar, including estimates for 120 countries. Results show that the size of the third pillar is substantial, both when measured as third pillar time (TPT) or third pillar participation (TPP). Global TPT is equivalent to 5.1 percent of total employment, more than half of the global agricultural sector. Moreover, findings indicate that TPP equals 13.4 percent, suggesting that more than one person in eight of the world's adult population is active as a volunteer in the third pillar.
Purpose
The world is experiencing democratic backsliding such that the situation is down back to 1986. This has resulted in the global shrinking of civic space for civil society organizations (CSOs). NGOs engaging in advocacy activities are seen to be among the CSOs affected. Using four NGOs cases from Tanzania, the study contributes to the civic space debate by uncovering how advocacy NGOs become resilient.
Design/methodology/approach
The study is anchored in interpretivism and a cross-sectional case study design, following a qualitative approach path. Data were collected through interviews and a documentary review.
Findings
Results show that several strategies such as complying, building community back-up, collaboration, strategic litigation, using digital media and changing the scope are applied. However, strategies face obstacles including scope limitations, expected democratic roles, high cost, changes in the scope and being outsmarted by the government, and hence their effectiveness is questionable.
Research limitations/implications
This study focused on advocacy NGOs. More studies can be conducted for other advocacy-related CSOs on how they become resilient.
Practical implications
While NGOs are allowed to exist in the country, their freedom continue to be curtailed. Even the effectiveness of resiliency becomes temporary and depends on the political will of the existing regime.
Originality/value
Tanzania NGOs have to build strong bonds with citizens, expand the scope of strategies and use deliberative democratic principles to educate the government to change laws and tolerate plural political culture. Also, NGOs in other countries with confined civic space can apply the same.
Local human rights organizations (LHROs) are key domestic and transnational actors, modifying, diffusing, and promoting liberal norms; mobilizing citizens; networking with the media and activists; and pressuring governments to implement international commitments. These groups, however, are reliant on international funds. This makes sense in politically repressive environments, where potential donors fear government retaliation, but is puzzling elsewhere. We interviewed 263 LHRO leaders and key informants from 60 countries, and conducted statistically representative surveys of 6180 respondents in India, Mexico, Morocco, and Nigeria. Based on these data, we believe LHRO funding in non-repressive environments is shaped by philanthropic logics of appropriateness. In the late 1990s, transnational activists successfully mainstreamed human rights throughout the international donor assistance community, freeing up development money for LHROs. Domestic activists in the global South have not promoted similar philanthropic transformations at home, where charitable giving still focuses on traditional institutions. Instead, domestic rights activists have followed the path of least resistance toward international aid, a logic of outcomes produced by variations in global logics of (philanthropic) appropriateness.
Local human rights organizations (LHROs) are crucial allies in international efforts to promote human rights. Without support from organized civil society, efforts by transnational human rights reformers would have little effect. Despite their importance, we have little systematic information on the correlates of public trust in LHROs. To fill this gap, we conducted key informant interviews with 233 human rights workers from sixty countries, and then administered a new Human Rights Perceptions Poll to representative public samples in Mexico (n = 2,400), Morocco (n = 1,100), India (n = 1,680), and Colombia (n = 1,699). Our data reveal that popular trust in local rights groups is consistently associated with greater respondent familiarity with the rights discourse, actors, and organizations, along with greater skepticism toward state institutions and agents. The evidence fails to provide consistent, strong support for other commonly held expectations, however, including those about the effects of foreign funding, socioeconomic status, and transnational connections.
Over the past two decades, donors increasingly link foreign aid to democracy objectives in Africa. This study investigates whether and how foreign aid influences specific outcomes associated with democratic transition and consolidation. Using an instrumental variables approach for the period from 1989 to 2008, we show that economic aid increases the likelihood of transition to multiparty politics, while democracy aid furthers democratic consolidation by reducing the incidence of multiparty failure and electoral misconduct. However, we find little evidence that either economic or democracy aid influences opposition support in multiparty elections. These findings have implications for understanding how donors allocate aid and the political consequences of foreign assistance in Africa.
In 2013, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) recorded 33 armed conflicts with a minimum of 25 battle-related deaths, up by one from 2012. Seven of these were recorded as wars, that is conflicts leading to 1,000 or more battle-related deaths in a calendar year. There have been 144 armed conflicts (47 wars) since 1989 and 254 armed conflicts (114 wars) since 1946. For the past ten years the amount of active armed conflict has fluctuated between 31 and 37. Six peace agreements were signed during the year 2013, two more than in the previous year. For the first time, this article also provides data on trends in battle-related deaths since 1989. These data do not show a clear time-trend. However, there is a particular difficulty in mapping the conflict in Syria, for which no credible battle-related deaths in 2013 can yet be reported.
What role does the international system play in amplifying the impact of domestic social movements on social change? The Argentine human rights movement reached the international system through the projection of cognitive and affective information—persuasion. International response was facilitated by the international human rights regime, and transnational nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) played a critical role. This challenge from above and below did have a clear impact on the target government and the development of broader mechanisms for the protection of human rights—even under the most severe conditions of repression and powerlessness.
A substantial section of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in the global South depend on foreign funds to conduct their operations. This paper explores how the availability of foreign funding affects their downward accountability, abilities to effect social change, and their relative influence in relation to traditional grassroots, membership‐based organizations (GROs), which tend not to receive such funding. Drawing on a case study of Nicaragua, we challenge the notion that foreign funding of domestic NGOs leads to the evolution of civil society organizations, which have incentives and abilities to organize the marginalized sections of society in ways to effect social change in their interests. Instead, we find that foreign funding and corresponding professionalization of the NGO sector creates dualism among domestic civil society organizations. Foreign funding enhances the visibility and prestige of the “modern” NGO sector over traditional GROs. This has grave policy implications because foreign funded NGOs tend to be more accountable to donors than beneficiaries and are more focused on service delivery than social change oriented advocacy.
Social and economic policy decisions are increasingly being taken in a global public domain in which national/transnational boundaries are blurred, and the `public' domain includes non-state actors. We argue that a new rights advocacy, advancing economic and social human rights as well as civil and political, is essential to understanding rule-making in the global public domain. New rights advocacy involves traditional human rights and development NGOs, social movement organizations and new `hybrid' organizations, in using human rights standards and methods to influence states, international organizations, and corporations. The new patterns of NGO engagement are studied through case studies of advocacy on HIV/AIDS and on the right to water. New rights advocacy constitutes a direct challenge to development orthodoxy, suggests a new interpretation of the social movements protesting globalization, and manifests a complex relationship between NGOs and poor country governments, in which NGOs often advocate on behalf of these governments' sovereign rights to set economic and social policy.
In the period 1946-2001, there were 225 armed conflicts and 34 of them were active in all of or part of 2001. Armed conflict remains a serious problem in the post-Cold War period. For three decades, the Correlates of War project has served as the main supplier of reliable data used in longitudinal studies of external and internal armed conflict. The COW datasets on war use the relatively high threshold of 1,000 battle-deaths. The Uppsala dataset on armed conflict has a lower threshold, 25 annual battle-deaths, but has so far been available for only the post-Cold War period. This dataset has now been backdated to the end of World War II. This article presents a report on armed conflict based on this backdate as well as another annual update. It presents the procedures for the backdating, as well as trends over time and breakdowns for the type of conflict. It assesses the criteria for measuring armed conflict and discusses some directions for future data collection in this area.
Empire of Humanity explores humanitarianism’s remarkable growth from its humble origins in the early nineteenth century to its current prominence in global life. In contrast to most contemporary accounts of humanitarianism that concentrate on the last two decades, Michael Barnett ties the past to the present, connecting the antislavery and missionary movements of the nineteenth century to today’s peacebuilding missions, the Cold War interventions in places like Biafra and Cambodia to post-Cold War humanitarian operations in regions such as the Great Lakes of Africa and the Balkans; and the creation of the International Committee of the Red Cross in 1863 to the emergence of the major international humanitarian organizations of the twentieth century. Based on extensive archival work, close encounters with many of today’s leading international agencies, and interviews with dozens of aid workers in the field and at headquarters, Empire of Humanity provides a history that is both global and intimate. Avoiding both romanticism and cynicism, Empire of Humanity explores humanitarianism’s enduring themes, trends, and, most strikingly, ethical ambiguities. Humanitarianism hopes to change the world, but the world has left its mark on humanitarianism. Humanitarianism has undergone three distinct global ages-imperial, postcolonial, and liberal-each of which has shaped what humanitarianism can do and what it is. The world has produced not one humanitarianism, but instead varieties of humanitarianism. Furthermore, Barnett observes that the world of humanitarianism is divided between an emergency camp that wants to save lives and nothing else and an alchemist camp that wants to remove the causes of suffering. These camps offer different visions of what are the purpose and principles of humanitarianism, and, accordingly respond differently to the same global challenges and humanitarianism emergencies. Humanitarianism has developed a metropolis of global institutions of care, amounting to a global governance of humanity. This humanitarian governance, Barnett observes, is an empire of humanity: it exercises power over the very individuals it hopes to emancipate. Although many use humanitarianism as a symbol of moral progress, Barnett provocatively argues that humanitarianism has undergone its most impressive gains after moments of radical inhumanity, when the “international community” believes that it must atone for its sins and reduce the breach between what we do and who we think we are. Humanitarianism is not only about the needs of its beneficiaries; it also is about the needs of the compassionate.
In Borders among Activists, Sarah S. Stroup challenges the notion that political activism has gone beyond borders and created a global or transnational civil society. Instead, at the most globally active, purportedly cosmopolitan groups in the world-international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs)-organizational practices are deeply tied to national environments, creating great diversity in the way these groups organize themselves, engage in advocacy, and deliver services. Stroup offers detailed profiles of these "varieties of activism" in the United States, Britain, and France. These three countries are the most popular bases for INGOs, but each provides a very different environment for charitable organizations due to differences in legal regulations, political opportunities, resources, and patterns of social networks. Stroup's comparisons of leading American, British, and French INGOs-Care, Oxfam, Médicins sans Frontières, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and FIDH-reveal strong national patterns in INGO practices, including advocacy, fund-raising, and professionalization. These differences are quite pronounced among INGOs in the humanitarian relief sector, and are observable, though less marked, among human rights INGOs. Stroup finds that national origin helps account for variation in the "transnational advocacy networks" that have received so much attention in international relations. For practitioners, national origin offers an alternative explanation for the frequently lamented failures of INGOs in the field: INGOs are not inherently dysfunctional, but instead remain disconnected because of their strong roots in very different national environments.
After seeing its reach increase for decades, international support for democracy and human rights faces a serious challenge: more and more governments are erecting legal and logistical barriers to democracy and rights programmes, publicly vilifying international aid groups and their local partners, and harassing such groups or expelling them altogether. Despite the significant implications of the pushback, this phenomenon remains poorly understood and responses to it are often weak. This article examines the scope of the pushback phenomenon, its impact on funders and their partners, its causes, and the responses to date. The article finds that international responses remain relatively weak due to a number of divisions within the democracy and rights community, and structural features of the international political system.
Anthony D. Smith is Emeritus Professor of Nationalism and Ethnicity at the London School of Economics, and is considered one of the founders of the interdisciplinary field of nationalism studies. Anthony Smith has developed an approach to the study of nations and nationalism called ethno-symbolism, which is concerned with the nature of ethnic groups and nations, and the need to consider their symbolic dimensions. This text provides a concise statement of an ethno-symbolic approach to the study of nations and nationalism and at the same time, embodies a general statement of Anthony Smith's contribution to this approach and its application to the central issues of nations and nationalism. The text: Sets out the theoretical background of the emergence of ethno-symbolism in a sustained and systematic argument. Explains its analysis of the formation of nations, their persistence and change and the role of nationalism. Demonstrates that an ethno-symbolic approach provides an important supplement and corrective to past and present intellectual orthodoxies in the field and addresses the main theoretical criticisms levelled at an ethno-symbolic approach. Drawing together and developing earlier brief resumes of Anthony Smith's approach, this book represents a summary of the theoretical aspects of his work in the field since l986. It will be useful to students and to all those who are interested in the issues raised by a study of ethnicity, nations and nationalism.
In response to corruption and inefficient state institutions in recipient countries, some foreign aid donors outsource the delivery of aid to nonstate development actors. Other donor governments continue to support state management of aid, seeking to strengthen recipient states. These cross-donor differences can be attributed in large measure to different national orientations about the appropriate role of the state in public service delivery. Countries that place a high premium on market efficiency (for example, the United States, United Kingdom, Sweden) will outsource aid delivery in poorly governed recipient countries to improve the likelihood that aid reaches the intended beneficiaries of services. In contrast, states whose political economies emphasize a strong state in service provision (for example, France, Germany, Japan) continue to support state provision. This argument is borne out by a variety of tests, including statistical analysis of dyadic time-series cross-section aid allocation data and individual-level survey data on a cross-national sample of senior foreign aid officials. To understand different aid policies, one needs to understand the political economies of donors.
Here is an accessible, up-to-date guide to event history analysis for researchers and advanced students in the social sciences. The foundational principles of event history analysis are discussed and ample examples are estimated and interpreted using standard statistical packages, such as STATA and S-Plus. Recent and critical innovations in diagnostics are discussed, including testing the proportional hazards assumption, identifying outliers, and assessing model fit. The treatment of complicated events includes coverage of unobserved heterogeneity, repeated events, and competing risks models. The authors point out common problems in the analysis of time-to-event data in the social sciences and make recommendations regarding the implementation of duration modeling methods.
The year 2014 marked the fortieth anniversary of Portugal’s Revolution of the Carnations, which inaugurated what Samuel P. Huntington dubbed the “third wave” of global democratization. Any assessment of the state of global democracy today must begin by recognizing—even marveling at—the durability of this historic transformation. When the third wave began in 1974, only about 30 percent of the world’s independent states met the criteria of electoral democracy—a system in which citizens, through universal suffrage, can choose and replace their leaders in regular, free, fair, and meaningful elections. At that time, there were only about 46 democracies in the world. Most of those were the liberal democracies of the rich West, along with a number of small island states that had been British colonies. Only a few other developing democracies existed—principally, India, Sri Lanka, Costa Rica, Colombia, Venezuela, Israel, and Turkey.
In the subsequent three decades, democracy had a remarkable global run, as the number of democracies essentially held steady or expanded every year from 1975 until 2007. Nothing like this continous growth in democracy had ever been seen before in the history of the world. While a number of these new “democracies” were quite illiberal—in some cases, so much so that Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way regard them as “competitive authoritarian” regimes—the positive three-decade trend was paralleled by a similarly steady and significant expansion in levels of freedom (political rights and civil liberties, as measured annually by Freedom House). In 1974, the average level of freedom in the world stood at 4.38 (on the two seven-point scales, where 1 is most free and 7 is most repressive). It then gradually improved during the 1970s and 1980s, though it did not cross below the 4.0 midpoint until the fall of the Berlin Wall, after which it improved to 3.85 in 1990. In 25 of the 32 years between 1974 and 2005, average freedom levels improved in the world, peaking at 3.22 in 2005.
And then, around 2006, the expansion of freedom and democracy in the world came to a prolonged halt. Since 2006, there has been no net expansion in the number of electoral democracies, which has oscillated between 114 and 119 (about 60 percent of the world’s states). As we see in Figure 1, the number of both electoral and liberal democracies began to decline after 2006 and then flattened out. Since 2006, the average level of freedom in the world has also deteriorated slightly, leveling off at about 3.30.
There are two ways to view these empirical trends. One is to see them as constituting a period of equilibrium—freedom and democracy have not continued gaining, but neither have they experienced net declines. One could even celebrate this as an expression of the remarkable and unexpected durability of the democratic wave. Given that democracy expanded to a number of countries where the objective conditions for sustaining it are unfavorable, due either to poverty (for example, in Liberia, Malawi, and Sierra Leone) or to strategic pressures (for example, in Georgia and Mongolia), it is impressive that reasonably open and competitive political systems have survived (or revived) in so many places. As a variant of this more benign interpretation, Levitsky and Way argue in this issue of the Journal that democracy never actually expanded as widely as Freedom House perceived in the first place. Thus, they contend, many of the seeming failures of democracy in the last ten to fifteen years were really deteriorations or hardenings of what had been from the beginning authoritarian regimes, however competitive.
Alternatively, one can view the last decade as a period of at least incipient decline in democracy. To make this case, we need to examine not only the instability and stagnation of democracies, but also the incremental decline of democracy in what Thomas Carothers has termed the “gray zone” countries (which defy easy classification as to whether or not they are democracies), the deepening authoritarianism in the non-democracies, and the decline in the functioning and self-confidence of the world’s established, rich democracies. This will be my approach in what follows.
The debate about whether...
This article explores many of the key theoretical and analytical issues attending empirical research on state sovereignty. It reviews recent research on sovereignty, the state, and state-building in an attempt to summarize what we now know or think we know about state sovereignty. Bringing the fruits of that research to bear on the concepts that define state sovereignty, I offer some criteria from which analysts might derive empirically testable propositions about sovereignty's historical status and future prospects. In conclusion, I argue that research on these issues should be (re-) directed to the bedrock of sovereignty: rule making and enforcement authority, or what I call policing.
stunning developments of the post-Cold War era, Russia has been host since the early 1990s to a virtual army of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) from the United States, Britain, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe. These NGOs, many of which receive funding from Western governments, have worked for years with local political and social activists on various aspects of democratic institutional development, such as helping to establish competitive political parties and elections, independent media, civic advocacy groups, free trade unions, and independent judiciaries. 1 Little is known (although much good and bad is believed) about the impact of this "democracy assistance. " For example, how have Western efforts helped, hurt, or been irrelevant to Rus-sians? What have been their positive and negative unintended consequences?
A core result of the aid allocation literature is that the quality of governance in recipient countries does not affect the amounts of foreign aid received. Donor countries may still give aid to poorly-governed countries because of a dilemma they face: those countries most in need typically also lack proper institutions. This paper argues that donors try to resolve this dilemma by delivering aid through non-state actors. Using aid shares as well as absolute amounts of aid allocated through state and non-state channels and considering different dimensions of governance, we provide evidence that bypassing governments via NGOs and multilateral organizations is indeed a response to weak recipient state institutions. The effect is stronger in aid sectors where donors can more easily switch between channels, and weaker for higher levels of economic self-interest among donors.
Despite the tumult associated with the national elections of 2011 and 2012, Putin's regime retains broad and deep connections with the electorate, but ominous signs of erosion portend bigger problems despite the coercive force and other resources at the authorities' disposal.
The state plays an important role in structuring and channeling civic activism in Russia. Rather than eliminating advocacy, it privileges the advocacy forms that it prefers. The larger challenge facing Russian NGOs is an apathetic public.
Recent assaults on foreign-funded civil society groups in Egypt and Russia reflect a worrisome trend: Since 2002, twenty countries have updated their laws to restrict foreign funding to NGOs. Under what conditions do governments set these restrictions in place? Using original data from nearly 100 countries and case studies of regime behavior in East Africa and the former Soviet Union, we find that vulnerable governments restrict foreign support to civil society when they feel vulnerable to domestic challenges. Yet, worries about international retaliation can restrain such behavior if governments believe that clamping down will cost them more than it is worth.
The volume outlines a new agenda for the study of advocacy organizations, which are often known as non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and social movement organizations. Instead of viewing advocacy NGOs as actors that are primarily motivated by principled beliefs, immune from collective action challenges, and prone to collaborating with other advocacy actors, we suggest modeling NGOs as collective actors that seek to fulfill both normative concerns and instrumental incentives, face collective action problems, and compete as well as collaborate with other advocacy actors that function in the same issue area. Because advocacy NGOs and firms share important characteristics (notwithstanding their differences), the firm analogy, we suggest, is an analytically useful way of studying advocacy actors. The collective action perspective provides a unifying analytical approach to the study of advocacy NGOs and firms (as well as governments) because it directs attention to the core challenges inherent in structuring and managing collective actors. This approach suggests the need to move beyond viewing NGOs as “saints” and firms as “sinners.” Indeed, the study of how and why hierarchies, networks, and alliances arise and are maintained in the context of firms can illuminate issues such as how advocacy NGOs and their networks emerge, how they internally organize, and how they strategize. We agree with Thomas Risse (this volume) that scholars interested in examining the structures, policies, and strategies of firms and their networks can derive useful insights from studying advocacy NGOs.
The article examines why many foreign-funded, resource- rich movements in developing countries have been unable to produce the massive mobilization found in other successful social movements with access to fewer resources. While foreign ties have brought substantial benefits to local movements, many such social movements have limited grass-roots support. The issue of external aid is at the core of an emerging research agenda in the fields of international relations, social movements, and development studies that focuses on the relationship between participatory development, democratization, and the process of transnationalization. Drawing on research work from these different fields, the article argues that by making constituency support irrelevant, internationalization through financial assistance has transformed conflict movements into consensus movements that follow an institutional, resource-dependent, non-conflictual strategy with no deep roots in the community. The article specifies the mechanisms by which foreign funding affects grass-roots mobilization. These arguments are examined with respect to evidence from around the world.
The concept of electoral competition is relevant to a variety of research agendas in political science, yet the question of how to measure electoral competition has received little direct attention. We revisit the distinction proposed by Giovanni Sartori between competition as a structure or rule of the game and competitiveness as an outcome of that game and argue that to understand which elections can be lost (and therefore when parties and leaders are potentially threatened by electoral accountability), scholars may be better off considering the full range of elections where competition is allowed. We provide a data set of all national elections between 1945 and 2006 and a measure of whether each election event is structured such that the competition is possible. We outline the pitfalls of other measures used by scholars to define the potential for electoral competition and show that such methods can lead to biased or incomplete findings. The new global data on elections and the minimal conditions necessary for electoral competition are introduced, followed by an empirical illustration of the differences between the proposed measure of competition and existing methods used to infer the existence of competition.
The conventional wisdom in the literature on aid allocation suggests that donors utilize bilateral aid as a tool to buy influence in the aid-receiving country. Those who conclude that aid is driven by donor self-interest focus on government-to-government aid transfers. However, this approach overlooks important variation in delivery tactics: Bilateral donors frequently provide aid to nonstate actors. This paper argues that donors resort to delivery tactics that increase the likelihood of aid achieving its intended outcome. In poorly governed recipient countries, donors bypass recipient governments and deliver more aid through nonstate actors, all else equal. In recipient countries with higher governance quality, donors engage the government and give more aid through the government-to-government channel. Using OLS and Probit regressions, I find empirical support for this argument. Understanding the determinants of donor delivery tactics has important implications for assessing aid effectiveness.
Why do OECD countries vary in their regulatory approach towards non-governmental organizations (NGOs)? This paper introduces an index to assess NGO regulation regarding barriers to entry, NGOs’ political capacity, and economic activity. Our cross-section analysis of 28 OECD countries offers preliminary evidence of systematic differences in NGO regulation between corporatist and pluralist systems. We suggest corporatist systems have more restrictive regulations because NGOs risk upsetting the political order and managed social consensus. In pluralist countries, NGOs face fewer restrictions because governments view them as substitutes for formal communication channels. We present two cases, Japan (corporatist) and the United States (pluralist), to illustrate this argument. In sum, macro-institutional arrangements of political representation have a crucial bearing on national styles of NGO regulation. Future uses of this index include examining the effects of national context on international NGOs, explaining variations in organizational structures and strategies among NGOs, and tracking variations in NGO-state relations over time.
Given the myriad of human rights abuses that occur globally and daily, why are some nations on the receiving end of a substantial amount of international opprobrium, while others receive far less attention and condemnation? The authors contend that the increasing presence of human rights organizations in such states is the critical link between the local and the international. Increases in the number of such groups contributes significantly to the generation of Amnesty International urgent actions, one of the most-often-utilized tools in naming and shaming campaigns against human rights abusing regimes. The authors find strong support for nearly all their hypotheses.
How do public regulations shape the composition and behavior of non-governmental organizations (NGOs)? Because many NGOs advocate for liberal causes such as human rights, democracy, and gender equality, they upset the political status quo. At the same time, a large number of NGOs operating in the Global South rely on international funding. This sometimes disconnects from local publics and leads to the proliferation of sham or “briefcase” NGOs. Seeking to rein in the politically inconvenient NGO sector, governments exploit the role of international funding and make the case for restricting the influence of NGOs which serve as foreign agents. To pursue this objective, states worldwide are enacting laws to restrict NGOs’ access to foreign funding. We examine this regulatory offensive through an Ethiopian case study, where recent legislation prohibits foreign-funded NGOs from working on politically sensitive issues. We find that most briefcase NGOs and local human rights groups in Ethiopia have disappeared, while survivors have either “rebranded” or switched their work from proscribed areas. This research note highlights how government can and do shape the population ecology of the non-governmental sector. Because NGOs seek legitimacy via their claims of grassroots support, a reliance of external funding makes them politically vulnerable. Any study of the NGO sector must include governments as the key component of NGOs’ institutional environment.
How do nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) affect local politics in developing democracies? Specifically, do NGOs have systematic effects on the fortunes of incumbent political parties in local elections? Existing work predicts starkly contradictory political effects: Some scholars claim that NGOs most likely help incumbents by providing services for which politicians can claim credit, whereas others believe that NGOs most likely hurt incumbents by facilitating political opposition. The authors argue that both of these effects are possible, depending on the size of a jurisdiction's population. In smaller populations, the authors hypothesize that NGOs facilitate collective action and decrease the ability of an incumbent to claim credit for projects; larger jurisdictions water down the effect of NGOs on collective action and permit incumbents' credit claiming. Strong support is found for hypotheses, using electoral, sociodemographic, and NGO data for all of 314 municipalities in Bolivia.
The George W. Bush administration's national security strategy, which asserts that the United States has the right to attack and conquer sovereign countries that pose no observable threat, and to do so without international support, is one of the most aggressively unilateral U.S. postures ever taken. Recent international relations scholarship has wrongly promoted the view that the United States, as the leader of a unipolar system, can pursue such a policy without fear of serious opposition. The most consequential effect of the Bush strategy will be a fundamental transformation in how major states perceive the United States and how they react to future uses of U.S. power. Major powers are already engaging in the early stages of balancing behavior against the United States, by adopting soft-balancing measures that do not directly challenge U.S. military preponderance but use international institutions, economic statecraft, and diplomatic arrangements to delay, frustrate, and undermine U.S. policies. If the Bush administration continues to pursue aggressive unilateral military policies, increased soft balancing could establish the basis for hard balancing against the United States. To avoid this outcome, the United States should renounce the systematic use of preventive war, as well as other aggressive unilateral military policies, and return to its traditional policy governing the use of force-a case-by-case calculation of costs and benefits.
Many questions of interest to political scientists may be answered with event history analysis, which studies the duration and timing of events. We discuss the statistical analysis of event history data - data giving the number, timing, and sequence of changes in a variable of interest. These methods are illustrated by examining three substantive political science problems: overt military interventions, challenger deterrence, and congressional career paths; many other applications are possible. Our article is intended to provide a better understanding of the growing number of applications that currently exist in political science and to encourage greater use of these models by showing why event history models are useful in political science research and explaining how one specifies and interprets these models.
This article introduces a large new cross-country database, the Database of Political Institutions. It covers 177 countries over 21 years, 1975-95. The article presents the intuition, construction, and definitions of the different variables. Among the novel variables introduced are several measures of checks and balances, tenure and stability, identification of party affiliation with government or opposition, and fragmentation of opposition and government parties in the legislature.
