Crisis Exposure and the Evolving Restrictiveness of Civil Society Regulation in Europe

• In Event: Civil society in times of crisis

Abstract

Long considered a problem of ‘third countries’ (e.g. EP 2017), in times of perpetual crisis the ‘shrinking of civil society space’ within EU member states has been high on the agenda of practitioners for a while (e.g. EESC 2012; 2017; EC 2018; EP 2015; 2018; CoE 2013; 2018; FRA 2018). By now a growing number of studies indeed indicate that democracies in Europe increasingly restrict civil society organizations (CSOs), i.e. membership-based voluntary organizations pursuing collective (social or political) goals that constitute the organizational fabric of these democratic regimes (e.g. Buyse 2018; Swiney 2019; Bolleyer 2021; Chaudhry 2022). Nevertheless, academic research has remained fragmented to date. Studies have tended to focus either on regulation related to one particular crisis (e.g. terrorism, financial crisis, the pandemic), specific types of organizations (e.g. human rights organizations) or developments in specific countries or regions (e.g. Central Eastern Europe). Relatedly, we lack an overarching theoretization of why such diverse crises as exposure to domestic terrorism, the sovereign debt crisis, the migration crisis or the pandemic ought to similary push established democracies to restrictive civil society space in the longer term, even when governments are not ideologically inclined to such measures to start with.
This paper makes a first attempt to close these interrelated gaps. First, we theorize why the (very different) crises EU member states have been exposed to over the last 20 years can be expected to similarly function as a likely driver of the increased restrictiveness of CSOs’ legal environments (defined by the balance of CSO privileges and obligations embedded in legislation). We argue that these major crises share that they involve governments’ handling of trade-offs between fundamental values/entitlements (e.g. liberty vs. security) that citizens expect their governments to guarantee simultaneously. They therefore all constitute situations in which governments make ‘tragic choices’ between alternatives that are normatively problematic and hence tend to be contested, which creates incentives towards the reconfiguration of democracies’ legal infrastructures in favour of government control over societal actors, irrespective of these governments’ ideological orientations. Second, we present the ‘Legal Change Dataset’ compiled by the ERC-funded CIVILSPACE project that has systematically coded changes in CSO privileges/obligations within primary legislation from 2000-2022 covering 12 EU (countries selected based on their different exposure to crises, being run by governments with most different ideological orientations). This dataset covers the evolving restrictiveness of CSO regulation in 13 legal domains covering the regulation of CSO basic rights (e.g. freedom of association, assembly, expression), access to state resouces (e.g. CSO tax benefits), core activities (e.g. lobbying) and the basic infrastructure available to CSOs to challenge the authorities (e.g. the regulation of NHRI, FOI). This datasets not only allows for the first encompassing assessment of how CSOs’ legal environments have changed in countries across the EU, across a variety of legal domains as well as over time. It allows us to test empirically to which extent ‘objective’ crisis exposure is a main driver of democracies’ tendencies to adopt CSO restrictions.

References

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Authors

• Nicole Bolleyer, LMU

• Gabriel Katz, University of Exeter