Ombuds Institutions as a Resource for Collective Legal Mobilization

Submission for S41 Panel 5. Legal Mobilization: Patterns and Consequences The task of the Austrian Ombudsman Board (AOB) is to investigate individual citizens’ complaints about the public administration. As we see in our research, however, increasingly citizen initiatives address the AOB with issues relevant to collectives of various sizes (neighbours, citizens of a certain community, persons experiencing similar forms of discrimination etc.). In this paper, we explore how, when and why collective actors mobilize the law in front of the national ombuds institution instead of addressing other legal institutions. Building on the existing bodies of literature in the fields of ombuds institutions (Hertogh 2013, Creutzfeldt und Bradford 2016, Hubeau 2018) and legal mobilization (McCann 2008, Scott 2017, Lehoucq &Taylor 2020), we focus on the reform-oriented, political mobilization of law by social groups. This perspective understands the use of law as participation in the political process aiming at societal change rather than at the solution of individual cases. On the basis of our empirical study we develop a typology with regard to the concerned persons (individual vs collective) and the content of the complaint (single case or collective aim), and discuss examples from our data for these four types of cases. We also investigate the consequences of citizens’ (political) mobilization of law by researching the conditions under which legal mobilization is successful at the AOB, and can thus have an impact on law and policy. This question is explored by two seemingly similar cases with different outcomes. In this paper, which is part of a larger mixed-methods research project, we primarily draw on data from in-depth interviews with citizens who engage in collective legal mobilization and the analysis of files; the findings are contextualized by results from our survey among AOB complainants (n=8,274) as well as our media analysis based on the AOB’s weekly TV broadcast.