Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Since 2001, there has been movement cross-nationally towards tightening government regulations on NGOs. While some countries have tightened registration requirements and limited NGOs’ political capacity, others have limited NGOs’ access to foreign financing or economic activities. We examine whether national regulations on NGOs’ political and economic activities are complements or substitutes, and why countries choose to regulate NGOs differently. Do countries that tend to regulate NGO financing tightly leave more political room for them to engage, while countries that regulate NGO political activity tightly provide more opportunities for alternative financing models? We argue that traditionally corporatist countries regulate NGOs’ political opportunity structures tightly, while pluralist countries more heavily regulate NGOs’ economic opportunity structures. While initial patterns of regulations trace back to historic state-society governance institutions, we argue recent regulatory changes are connected to shifting patterns of threat from transnational terrorism and popular movements. Old patterns of regulation are breaking and new patterns are more closely tied to power politics and geographic location (alliance patterns and neighborhood effects) than domestic state-society relations. We use an original dataset of national regulations in 34 members of the OECD from 1950 until 2013 in order to test these arguments. If transnational diffusion trumps domestic logic in the production of national NGO regulations, this will have important effects on NGO development in the future. Traditionally powerful NGOs, built on old institutional landscapes, will feel new challenges while new rules open new opportunity structure for other organizations. The resulting NGOs, however, will be better suited to operate internationally than domestically, with weaker connections to the grassroots and a reduced ability to fulfill the traditional mandates of NGOs in addressing underserved and underrepresented populations.