CSO Restrictions and Support as Symptoms of Democratic Erosion and Autocratization: The Case of Thailand

Regimes across the globe –ranging from established democracies to autocracies– increasingly adopt legal provisions that curtail civil society organizations’ (CSOs) capacity to survive, operate and perform key tasks, i.e. that delimit CSOs’ room for manoeuvre or, as we call it, legally defined civil society space. We argue that how governments treat CSOs through their official and visible law-making activities and how much they legally differentiate between, from a government perspective, desirable and undesirable CSOs (e.g. government-friendly vs. oppositional; domestic vs. foreign CSOs) in the constraints they impose or support they allocate can serve as an important indication to which extent governments are committed to societal pluralism and to nurturing a politically active society. To examine our argument, we study the evolving restrictiveness of CSO regulation targeting, from a government perspective, undesirable organizations as well as regulation designed to strengthen government-friendly CSOs in Thailand since 2001, a period during which the regime transformed from an electoral democracy to autocracies (both electoral and closed autocracies). With several regime transitions during the last 24 years (2001-2025), Thailand provides an ideal case, allowing us to explore to which extent the way the government regulates civil society can indeed function as a symptom of democratic decline and, eventually, regime transformation. Our qualitative analysis of Thailand’s CSO regulations supports our main argument. We find that the government’s repeated legal and non-legal efforts to restrict and repress CSOs led to deep conflicts between NGOs and several democratically-elected governments. This pattern serves as a clear indication of the government’s deliberate consolidation of power and erosion of democratic mechanisms, which, in the case of Thailand, culminated in regime transitions through the 2005-2006 anti-government protests and the 2006 military coup. This study advances our understanding of democratic erosion and autocratization through patterns of legislative lawfare against CSOs.