Shaping Resource Environments: Populism, Government Funding Reforms and Civil Society

This paper presents a novel examination of how governments influenced by right-wing populist parties employ funding mechanisms directed to civil society organisations to govern a specific policy area. The rise of right-wing populist parties to power has the potential to significantly alter state-civil society relations across Europe (Arato & Cohen, 2021). While studies of populism and civil society have flourished in Eastern European contexts (Ekiert & Kubik, 2021), particularly examining direct interventions against civil society actors, less attention has been paid to Western European countries. Moreover, while research has explored populism's effects on political institutions and public policies (Caiani & Graziano, 2022), limited scholarly inquiry has examined how governments influenced by right-wing populist parties use public funding to control civil society organisations and their actions. The paper presents results from a qualitative case study involving two cases of reforms of public funding to civil society organisations in Italy and Sweden. Both reforms were implemented when national policies were influenced by right-wing populist parties. We want to answer two research questions: 1) Which (types of) organisations receive funding, and under what conditions? 2) How does public funding influence the activities and functions of civil society organisations? We draw on two strands of research. The first strand involves studies on state funding of civil society, often looking into resource dependency, accountability, adaptation and co-optation. The second strand involves studies on populist governance and populist parties’ control of civil society actors through different policy measures. The theoretical framework for the study mainly consists of the political opportunity structure approach and its development in social movement studies to include economic opportunity structures. The comparison between Italy and Sweden is particularly revealing. The two countries are characterised by different roles for civil society, service provision in Italy and advocacy in Sweden. Also, the way public funding is provided to civil society differs between the two countries, which are centralised in Sweden and decentralised in Italy. The cases chosen for the study are adult education in Sweden and activities of general interest in Italy. The cases are neither ideal-typical for each country’s funding system nor specular in their dynamics. They provide two examples of changes in funding programs in times of the increasing influence of populist parties over public policy. The data includes official public documents and interviews with key informants. In the concluding part, the paper discusses the extent to which these two reforms can be seen as a continuation of austerity measures inspired by neoliberal trends in public administration or a shift towards increasing control of civil society organisations based on ideological tensions between a progressive civil society and national governments promoting a nationalist, conservative policy agenda.