How do Governments regulate Civil Society Groups? Drivers and Consequences

Abstract

The legal framework is one of the most important ways in which governments interact with civil society groups, i.e., membership-based voluntary organizations pursuing collective (social or political) goals that constitute the organizational fabric of democratic societies. Over the past decade, however, practitioners and a growing number of academic studies have indicated that democracies in Europe increasingly adopt policies that restrict the ability of these groups to form and operate, raising normative and empirical questions about the evolving restrictiveness of the regulatory environment, its drivers, as well as its immediate and long-term consequences, both to groups and to democracy at large (e.g. EESC 2017; EC 2018; EP 2018; FRA 2018; Buyse 2018; Swiney 2019; Bolleyer 2021; Chaudhry 2022). Despite this topic’s salience, academic research has remained fragmented. Studies have tended to focus either on legal regulation in response to particular crises, types of organizations or regions (e.g. Central Eastern Europe). This panel takes a holistic approach to describing the regulatory dynamics impacting such groups in Europe, offering both macro perspectives on crisis exposure and the evolution of legal frameworks, and nuanced considerations of country-specific contexts. Theoretically, the panel considers the evolution of restrictions on as well as privileges granted to groups in different EU member states to do justice to both the constraining but also the permissive consequences of government action. It includes papers on the ‘usual suspects’ in CEE deemed at the forefront of such tendencies and contrasts them with countries widely considered resilient to such tendencies. The panel takes into account that increasing restrictiveness of groups’ legal regulation in some domains (e.g. lobby regulations, freedom of association, freedom of expression) might be counteracted by the enhancement of privileges and protections in other domains (freedom of information, access to courts), highlighting the importance to take an encompassing rather than selective perspective on groups' legal environments. Finally, the panel considers the impact of crisis exposure on the evolving restrictiveness of civil society regulation in Europe.

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