Partisan Politics, Shrinking Civic Space and Advocacy Organizations: Why Legal Form and Funding Models Matter

• In Event: Strengthening Civil Society Under Political Pressure

Abstract

Advocacy organizations regularly engage in partisan politics, yet this has rarely been examined by IR scholars of advocacy (Karpf 2012; Hall 2022). Rather the scholarship on transnational advocacy typically focuses on issue-based campaigns – whether it be human rights, women’s rights, or environmental protection – and conceives of advocacy organizations as charities which are prevented from engaging in partisan politics by virtue of their legal status (Schmitz and Mitchell 2022). In doing so, the IR scholarship has missed out on the wide diversity of legal forms, and funding models can NGOs take (Dupuy et al., 2016; Heiss & Kelley, 2017; Pallas & Bloodgood, 2022). This article suggests that studying the legal form and funding models of advocacy organizations would enrichen IR scholarship, by moving beyond existing categorizations such as niche/general; new/old; digital/traditional and/or moderate/radical (Eilstrup-Sangiovanni, 2019; Hadden, 2015). This article contributes to an existing IR scholarship which studies the internal characteristics of advocacy organizations to understand their behavior and strategies for influencing (Heiss & Johnson, 2016; Stroup & Wong, 2018; Wong, 2012).

Understanding organizational form has importance beyond academia. Afterall, advocacy organizations across the world are increasingly facing government restrictions and repression, as governments shrink civic space (Chaudhry, 2022; Chaudhry & Heiss, 2022; Heiss & Kelley, 2017; Teets, 2014). 130 countries have restricted NGOs access to foreign funding and a large and growing literature has explored variation in government regulation of civil society (Breen et al., 2019; Chaudhry, 2022; DeMattee, 2019). However, IR scholars have not fully explored the different legal forms and funding models available to advocacy organizations and hence not appreciated the wide range of ways NGOs can innovate, avoid, or respond to government restrictions (McMahon and Niparko, 2022). In this article, I suggest advocacy organizations are not completely constrained by their regulatory environments; but can choose to change their legal form, and/or funding models.

References

See abstract.

Author

• Nina W T Hall, Johns Hopkins SAIS