The Multidimensionality of Legal Reforms and Their Consequences for Democracy: A Study of Chilling Effects in Polish and German Civil Society

Various studies have highlighted a worrying trend: many regimes – including established democracies in Europe – increasingly adopt legal provisions that curtail civil society organizations’ (CSOs’) capacity to survive, operate and perform key tasks, with detrimental effects on democratic quality and resilience. While by now we find nuanced analyses on the nature of legal reforms adopted by different countries in recent years, we to date have insufficient knowledge about different legal changes’ likely effects on political activities in civil society sectors such as groups’ readiness to pubically criticize the government or trying to seek political influence. This is surprising in face of growing concerns of researchers and policymakers alike around not only direct legal constraints on CSO activities but also chilling effects, i.e. self-censoring by groups confronted with legal changes they perceive as hostile. To explore possible organizational responses to different reform scenarios, we have conducted two large-scale CSO population studies in Germany and Poland, implementing a carefully designed conjoint experiment that takes seriously the multidimensionality of legal reforms, with the aim to disentangle the repercussions of different key reform elements for the surveyed groups’ political activities. Critically, reform scenarios not only varies ‘objective’ legal properties of new regulation presented to participants such as regulatory reach (sector-wide vs. policy field-specific) or the permissiveness/harshness of provisions but also contextual factors such as the ideological orientation of the government implementing the reform or the level of the endorsement of the reform by the CSO sector. Being able to disentangle these different elements’ implications for CSO responses, our data will provide unique insights into whether and how legal reforms impact on a vital dimension of CSOs’ contribution to democracy.