Abstract
AbstractDoes the adoption of restrictive regulations shape numbers of non-governmental organizations? Since the late 1990s, governments around the world have been enacting new legal measures designed to suppress civil society’s functions and organizational space to carry out advocacy and politically oriented work. Scholars have investigated the impact of these new regulations on foreign aid flows, voting behavior, and on organizations, but to date, we lack a systematic analysis about the cross-national global effects of these legal restrictions on numbers of international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) in particular, since it is these organizations (and their funders) that have been heavily targeted. In this research note, we fill this gap through an empirical analysis of the effects of various types of restrictive laws on INGO numbers in 96 countries between 1992 and 2018 and find that advocacy restrictions result in a reduction of transnational human rights organizations but not numbers of INGOs.
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Reference37 articles.
1. Anheier, H. K., Markus, L., & Stefan, T. (2020). Comparative nonprofit sector research: A critical assessment. In Walter W. Powell and Patricia Bromley (Eds.), The nonprofit sector: A research handbook (3rd ed.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
2. Bailer, S., Bodenstein, T., & Finn Heinrich, V. (2012). Explaining the strength of civil society: Evidence from cross-sectional data. International Political Science Review, 34(3), 289–309. https://doi.org/10.1177/0192512111419823
3. Bakke, K. M., Mitchell, N. J., & Smidt, H. M. (2020). When states crack down on human rights defenders. International Studies Quarterly, 64(1), 85–96. https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqz088
4. Bloodgood, E. (2010). Institutional environment and the organization of advocacy NGOs in the OECD. In Aseem Prakash and Mary Kay Gugerty (eds.). Advocacy Organizations and Collective Action, pp. 91–129. Cambridge University Press.
5. Bloodgood, E., Stroup, S., & Wong, W. H. (2023). What counts? How to use different sources of NGO data. VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 34, 126–132. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11266-021-00396-w