Foreign Aid or Foreign Agents? The Rise of Legislative Restrictions on Foreign Funding to NGOs in Democracies and Developing Countries

Abstract

"This study investigates the rise of legislative restrictions on foreign funding to NGOs, a global trend occurring not only in aid-dependent, non-democratic regimes but also more recently in developed economies and democracies. Given the difficulty of large N analysis to differentiate between these various cases, I create a dataset of 65 countries with legislative restrictions and differentiate between developed and developing economies, as well as consolidated and transitioning democracies. I use panel data, polynomial interpolation, and logistic regression to examine predictors of foreign funding restrictions, in particular, foreign aid, natural resource extraction, conflict risk, and regime type. By collapsing the wide variety of cases into regime type, and within regime type, differentiating between resource-rich countries as well as countries prone to global risk in terms of national and subnational power, my framework accounts for the rise of legislative restrictions across diverse political and economic contexts, and pays close attention to the paradox of the rise of foreign funding restrictions in developing country democracies. Overall, the presence of the extractive industry is highly significant across regime types and even in democracies in particular as the majority of countries with restrictions are resource-rich."