Various approaches in party and group research as well as in organizational sociology – most notably resource dependency theory - stress the influence that the state exercises on civil society organizations. This paper asks which voluntary membership organizations constitutive of civil society such as political parties, interest groups or service-oriented organizations consider state dependency as a major concern and why. To address this question, we develop a framework on how external regulatory constraints (e.g. the administrative burden related to state funding) as compared to organizational properties (e.g. type of organization, access to membership fees, number of paid staff) affect whether organizations perceive a decrease in state funding or changed government requirements to access such funding as an important challenge to maintain themselves.
This framework is tested using new data from four recently completed party and group surveys conducted in four democracies with very different regulatory environments to assess whether the perception of state dependency as a major challenge is predominantly driven by regulatory constraints or by properties of the organization itself.
