An Institutional Approach to Understanding CSO Regulatory Regimes: An Historical Analysis of 19 Countries

• In Event: Does Civil Society Replicate Political Inequality?

Abstract

CSO regulatory regimes are the legal institutions that regulate civil society. They can be conducive to the growth of civil society, or they can stifle opportunities for voluntary association and reinforce political inequalities. This paper discusses where these institutions come from and the degree to which domestic, international, and historical factors shape their development.

It is long recognized that the institutions we see today are rarely formed “whole cloth” and are instead the outputs of institutional change caused by decisions made by those with the power to alter institutions. Thus, to understand the development of CSO regulatory regimes in different countries, it is necessary to separate the sources of institutional change. I test these expectations and their accompanying hypotheses using a directed dyadic analysis of 14 East African countries and the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council. The directed dyad-year event history analysis relies on a rigorous 58-part coding protocol applied to the 200+ laws passed by 19 countries between 1960 and 2018. Preliminary results indicate that policy diffusion from geographic neighbors is largely insignificant compared to the international influence of Security Council members and that internal factors—both domestic politics and the preexisting institutions—have a strong influence over local policy decisions. These findings further our understanding of CSO regulatory regimes and argue they are political institutions with many dimensions and long histories.

Author

• Anthony DeMattee, Indiana University, Bloomington