The Expansion of Civil Society Regulation: Tackling the Challenges of Studying Legal Complexity and Redundancy Across Democracies and Over Time

Various studies have highlighted a worrying trend: many regimes, including established democracies, are increasingly adopting legal provisions that restrict the ability of civil society organizations (CSOs) to survive and carry out key tasks, which arguably has a detrimental effect on the quality and resilience of democracy. These concerns, shared by policymakers and researchers alike, have led to considerable interest in the comparative study and evaluation of CSO regulations within democracies’ legal frameworks. But the fragmentation of laws and the diversity of legal tools governments use pose substantial challenges to researchers who try to systematically approach the phenomenon. This paper examines and proposes solutions for compiling nuanced, systematic, and unbiased legal data across jurisdictions and over time. Building on the Civilspace project, we use a dataset of 321 indicators that record the annual adoption or removal of CSO limitations and benefits in twelve European countries from 2000 to 2022. The paper outlines the dataset’s design and how it addresses key obstacles. First, we describe how the data was designed to allow scholars to map the evolving complexity and multidimensionality of CSOs’ legal environments in twelve legal domains, encompassing regulation of CSO existence, resource access, CSO voice and rights infrastructures to monitor and contest government action. Second, we illustrate the value added of such a design, focusing on the study of increasing legal complexity and legal redundancies, which come with the growth of CSO regulation across Europe. Third, based on the previous considerations, we outline avenues for future data collection and analysis that can advance the state of the art in the cross-national study of legal change. On the one hand, we identify directions for researchers conducting ‘neutral’ evaluations of regulatory design, which allow them to assess legal complexity or compare regulations’ substance with their declared objectives. On the other hand, we identify approaches for scholars studying democratic erosion through ‘illiberal reforms’ or legislative ‘lawfare’ targeting ‘undesirable’ CSOs, which provide a foundation for assessing how governments restrict the space for civil society or selectively target particular segments thereof. Proposal for Panel "P5 Democratic challenges of regulatory governance".