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Abstract:
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"The number of civil society organizations (CSOs) around the world has expanded since the late-20th Century, and so too have the laws and policies regulating the sector. A growing number of researchers study these laws and caution the regulatory expansion is, in fact, a global crackdown on civil society. This article asks two questions of a thoroughly researched form of legal repression—governments’ restrictions on foreign aid to CSOs. First, do institutional differences affect the adoption of these laws? Second, do laws that appear different in content also have different causes? A two-stage analysis answers these questions using data from 138 countries from 1993-2012. The first analysis introduces institutional variables concerning constitution-level differences regarding international treaties and the ratification of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). The study then uses competing risk models to test whether the factors that predict law adoption varies across law types. The study finds constitutions and preexisting institutions matter. Given a country ratifies the ICCPR, constitutional rules that place treaties above ordinary legislation create preexisting institutions that make adopting restrictive laws less likely. Competing risk models find different laws have different risk factors, which suggests these laws are more conceptually distinct than analysts presume. Alternative strategies for event history analysis and rare event models confirm all general findings. The practical significance of these findings are twofold: first, when studying the adoption of laws, analysts should incorporate into their theory the preexisting institutions that structure the legal context and constrain lawmaking. Next, studies should embrace conceptual differences among laws. Doing so allows us to build up theory concerning their origins, implementation, and effects on people and organizations. Implementing these findings in future work will strengthen the theory, methods, and concepts used to understand the legal approaches states choose to regulate civil society."
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