Right-wing Populism, Crisis Exposure and the Rise of CSO Restriction in Europe

Abstract

Speakers: Niicole Bolleyer, LMU Munich Gabriel Katz, University of Exeter Discussant: Hannah Smidt, University of St. Gallen This paper theorises and empirically analyses under which conditions the crises to which EU member states have been exposed to over the last 20 years have functioned as drivers of an increased restrictiveness of civil society organisations’ legal environments. We argue that major ‘regime crises’, as exemplified by domestic terrorism and the COVID-19 pandemic, involve governments’ handling of trade-offs between fundamental values/entitlements (e.g. liberty vs. security or health) that citizens expect governments to guarantee simultaneously, forcing governments into contentious policy choices. Such constellations in themselves create incentives towards the reconfiguration of democracies’ legal infrastructures in favour of enhanced government control over societal actors (i.e. increasing legal restrictiveness), whether as part of crisis management itself or, alternatively, in response to social resistance against such crisis management. At the same time, we expect right-wing populist government to ideologically favour enhancing legal restrictions on CSOs and to use such crises as window of opportunity to push through restrictive measures, which is why we theorise the implications of government ideology and crisis exposure in isolation and conjunction. We examine our hypotheses using a new dataset covering the evolution of CSO restrictions across nine legal domains in 12 countries with most different levels of crisis exposure from 2000-2021. In essence, we find that fundamental crises challenging the provision of essential values or entitlements 'objectively' push liberal democracies towards restricting their societies irrespective of government ideology, while right-wing populist government parties exploit such crises, narrowing down legal space for civil society groups further.