The Rise of Foreign Funding Restrictions on NGOs and Counter-Mobilization in Hybrid Regimes.

• In Event: Civil Society and Authoritarianism: Effects on NGOs and Coping Strategies

Abstract

This study investigates the rise of legislative restrictions on foreign funding to NGOs. Legislative restrictions on foreign funding to NGOs are most likely to occur in hybrid and authoritarian regimes, which are most prevalent in the developing world. Given the difficulty of large N analysis to differentiate between these various cases, I create a dataset of 65 countries with legislative restrictions and differentiate between developed and developing economies, as well as consolidated and transitioning democracies, and perform regression analysis. I use panel data, polynomial interpolation, and logistic regression to examine predictors of foreign funding restrictions, in particular, foreign aid, natural resource extraction, conflict risk, and regime type. In a second paper, I use comparative historical analysis to discuss the rise of legislative restrictions of foreign funding to NGOs in hybrid regimes. I examine the role of crisis, such as the drop in oil prices, proximity to terror attacks, proximity to recent democratization revolts, experiencing a natural disaster, proximity to recent conflict, having a high refugee population, in adopting foreign funding restrictions, and find that proximity of crisis may partially explain neighborhood effects of foreign funding restriction legislation, particularly in Central Asia and East Africa.

A complementary approach to exploring the rise of legislative restrictions is to compare regimes that that made different choices. (Christensen & Weinstein, 2013) Many regimes that were classified as hybrid a few years ago at the time of previous work are now consolidated authoritarian. Since hybrid authoritarian regimes are the main site of contestation against NGO restrictions, I choose instead to focus on two hybrid authoritarian regimes that experience democratic backsliding yet were able to resist passage of draft legislation. Kenya and Kyrgyzstan are the only two hybrid regimes where civil society has successfully resisted draft legislation of foreign funding restrictions, yet the tension between civil society and the government still persists. In both instances, there has been strong mobilization of civil society due to strong international ties. I conduct a preliminary social network analysis through the use of Twitter API to compare international linkages within the counter-mobilization movement in Kenya and Kyrgyzstan.

Overall, I find that legislative restrictions on foreign funding to NGOs are largely driven by perceived threats not only to authoritarian control but also to executive power and state sovereignty more broadly. By collapsing the wide variety of cases into regime type, and within regime type, differentiating between resource-rich countries as well as countries prone to global risk in terms of national and subnational power, my framework accounts for the rise of legislative restrictions across diverse political and economic contexts, and provides a cross-case comparison of successful social mobilization against foreign funding restrictions in two hybrid regimes.

Works Cited

Christensen, Darin and Jeremy Weinstein. 2013. “Defunding Dissent: Restrictions on Aid to NGOs.” Journal of Democracy 24(2): April 2013.

Author

• Michelle Reddy, Stanford University