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

This paper explores theoretically and empirically why the different crises to which EU member states have been exposed over the last 20 years similarly function as drivers of the increased restrictiveness of CSOs’ legal environments—an early symptom of democratic backsliding in the continent. We argue that these major crises, as exemplified by domestic terrorism, sovereign debt crises, and the COVID-19 pandemic, involve governments’ handling of trade-offs between fundamental values/entitlements (e.g. liberty vs. security) that citizens expect 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. Following this first theory-oriented section, we use the ‘Legal Change Dataset’, compiled by the ERC-funded CIVILSPACE project, to test empirically to which extent ‘objective’ crisis exposure is a main driver of democracies’ tendencies to adopt CSO restrictions.