Policy Diffusion and the Development of CSO Regulatory Regimes in East Africa

• In Event: Transnational Interest Group Effects on Democracy and Sustainability

Abstract

CSO regulatory regimes are the law-based institutions that regulate civil society. Most research on these institutions treats them as tools of judicial repression that governments use to weaken democracy and stay in power. But the degree to which these legal institutions emerge and change in response to international influences is unclear for three reasons: the conceptualization of these regimes is underdeveloped, laws are assumed to contain the same provisions, and analysts use outdated methods to test for cross-border diffusion. This analysis overcomes these challenges using a 58-part coding protocol to code 285 laws from 17 countries over 55 years. A directed dyad-year event history approach analyses these data and tests hypotheses related to three policy diffusion processes: emulation, learning, and competition. Results show international factors strongly affect the composition of rules that facilitate voluntary association. These findings further our understanding of CSO regulatory regimes and argue that these rule-based frameworks are political institutions that change—sometimes for the better and sometimes not—due to international influences, as well as historical and domestic factors.

Author

• Anthony James DeMattee, Emory University