Political Organisation in Transformation? The Impact of State Regulation on Parties, Interest Groups and NGOs in Advanced Democracies

This workshop will explore the apparent convergence in how democratic states regulate the organisational form and capabilities of parties, interest groups and non-governmental organisations (NGOs). More particularly, it is interested in a) the comparative study of regulatory frameworks governing these membership-based, voluntary organisations including how these frameworks have changed over time and in b) the comparative study of similarities and differences in how these different organisational types respond to regulatory frameworks within and across countries. Various literatures have pointed to an increasing state regulation of voluntary organisations, inviting their professionalisation, centralisation and increasing dependency on state funds. More particularly, party research highlights parties’ transformation into ‘state institutions’ or ‘semi-public agencies’ (Epstein 1989; Katz and Mair 2009; Biezen 2012), while interest group scholars show how citizen groups turn into ‘protest businesses’, more interested in institutional funding than member support (Jordan & Maloney 1997; Bosso 2005; Halpin 2010). Finally, voluntary sector and civil society research have argued that volunteer associations turn into staff-driven ‘voluntary agencies’ delivering state services (DiMaggio & Anheier 1990; Hasenfeld & Gidron 2005; Billis 2010). These tendencies are problematic for democracy since they supposedly go hand in hand with the weakening of these organisations’ accountability towards citizens. Due to disciplinary divides, existing parallels in how the state tries to influence voluntary organisations such as parties, interest groups and welfare-providing NGOs and parallels in how these organisational types respond to state regulation have received only little attention so far (Bolleyer 2013). To bridge those divides, we aim at bringing scholars from the relevant subfields together to map out a) changes in state regulation across different organisational types and across democracies and b) assess regulations’ impact on organisations’ internal and external operations. This proposal is endorsed by both the ECPR Standing Groups on Political Parties and on Interest Groups.