Conclusion

This chapter recapitulates the main findings of this study and the conceptual, methodological, and empirical strategies chosen to generate them. Based on a new interdisciplinary framework on democracies’ legal dispositions towards civil society regulation, this study has shown that the nature of voluntary organizations’ legal environments adopted in long-lived democracies varies with the relative acceptability of constraining regulation in that sphere, which, in turn, is shaped by distinct configurations of a political system’s democratic history, its legal family, and its voluntary sector traditions. It concludes by pointing to a central avenue of future research for which this study has laid the groundwork—the assessment of organizational responses to the variety of legal environments that long-lived democracies have created.

The Voluntarist Path towards a Permissive Legal Environment for Organized Civil Society

In the last part of the study, ideal-typical representatives of three ‘sufficient paths’ identified by the QCA analysis were chosen for in-depth analysis. After explaining the case selection, this chapter analyses the evolution of the legal framework in Sweden representing the ‘voluntarist’ path towards a permissive environment for voluntary organizations. Despite various initiatives towards the adoption of legal regulation of voluntary organizations, reforms were usually considered not sufficiently beneficial for the organizations targeted, or legislation was considered unsuitable as an instrument to address the problem at hand, tendencies rooted in the informality of historically grown relations between the state and organizations in this social democratic voluntary sector regime. If legislation was adopted, it echoed characteristics of Scandinavian civil law by tending towards broad principles that impose few direct constraints on the organizations targeted, leaving plenty of room for interpretation, while putting an emphasis on benefit allocation.

The Regulation of Interest Groups and Public Benefit Organizations

This chapter presents a detailed empirical assessment of cross-country variation in the regulation of interest groups and public benefit organizations in the operation stage—covering the regulation of these organizations’ constitutive functions as well as of resource access—across nineteen long-lived democracies. Regarding regulation of organizations’ constitutive functions, it covers areas such as lobby regulation, third-party regulation, and other legal restrictions on groups’ political activities. In terms of resource regulation, it covers aspects such as tax benefits for donors and organizations themselves as well as the regulation of fundraising. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the monitoring and supervision structures in charge of implementing group regulation. The analysis shows how interest groups and public benefit organizations have to operate within a complex web of legal regulation, which fundamentally affects their ability to engage in political activities and access state resources.

The Legal Environments of Organized Civil Society in Nineteen Democracies

As the nature of legal environments for organized civil society is the product of causally complex processes, it is not expected that any one systemic condition by itself underpins a particular legal environment. Consequently, the analysis presented employs Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), which is ideally suited to identify multiple, complex paths towards a particular outcome. The findings widely substantiate the theoretical framework presented in Chapter 6 and thereby stress the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to the question at hand. They show that the nature of voluntary organizations’ legal environments adopted in long-lived democracies varies with the relative acceptability of constraining regulation in that sphere, which, in turn, is shaped by distinct configurations of political systems’ democratic history, their legal family, and voluntary sector traditions.

The Statist Path towards a Constraining Legal Environment for Organized Civil Society

France represents the ‘statist path’ towards a constraining legal environment. While legal constraints on civil society actors were generally justifiable as a means to protect the state and to assure the political regime’s long-term stability, legal constraints imposed on voluntary organizations tended to be enhanced in conjunction with state benefits made available to them to strengthen the democracy’s societal underpinning. Such a balanced approach is visible in the regulation of parties but also of service-providing organizations. The latter gained increasing importance from the early 1980s onwards, feeding into an expansion of legal constraints as well as funding opportunities for voluntary organizations in this corporatist voluntary sector regime. Since then, concerns about regime stability as a driver of constraining regulation have become less important as France enjoys long-term political stability. This contrasts with incentives generated by the country’s corporatist voluntary sector traditions, which have gained in importance instead.

The Legal Regulation of Political Parties in Long-Lived Democracies

This chapter first explores what we miss when we focus on party-specific legal regulation (which explicitly names parties or regulates party-specific functions) as the core of political parties’ legal environments. It then shows that, while party-specific regulation has gained prominence in many democracies, parties are nonetheless often subsumed under broader legal categories such as ‘private association’ or ‘company by limited guarantee’ and hence regulated through NPO (non-profit) regulation. Such ‘legal inclusiveness’ can be found across all developmental stages of parties’ life cycles—formation, operation, and dissolution. Covering nineteen long-lived democracies, the chapter includes detailed comparative analyses of party-specific regulation and NPO-regulation applicable to parties in each stage, covering a wide range of aspects, such as how parties can acquire legal personality (formation), the regulation of direct and indirect party resources (operation), as well as the regulation of party bans (dissolution) and the supervision structures underpinning regulation.

The Legal Regulation of Organized Civil Society

This introduction specifies the central questions addressed in this study—namely, what are the legal environments (as constituted by binding legal regulation) that have been created in long-lived democracies to steer the behaviour of membership-based, voluntary organizations—interest groups, parties, and public benefit organizations—that constitute organized civil society? And why do democracies adopt more or less constraining regulation in this sphere, in which state intervention is generally considered contentious? Having done so, it addresses three fundamental issues stressing the importance of these themes: first, why bother writing a book-length study on the legal regulation of voluntary organizations in particular? Second, why not focus on one particular type of organization (for example, interest groups or parties), as earlier cross-national studies have done? And, finally, what do we gain substantially and analytically by comparing the nature of legal regulation not only across a variety of countries but also across distinct organizational types and why focus on the three types of interest groups, parties, and public benefit organizations and not others?

The Regulation of Interest Groups and Public Benefit Organizations in Long-Lived Democracies

This chapter presents a detailed empirical assessment of cross-country variation in the regulation of interest groups and public benefit organizations in the stages of organizational formation and dissolution across nineteen long-lived democracies. More specifically, it covers constitutional rights, ban regulations, and legal incorporation. On that basis, it assesses differences between non-profit (NPO) regulation and the regulation of public benefit organizations (PBO regulation). The analysis stresses the importance of ‘legal inclusiveness’—that is, NPO regulation applying to public benefit organizations as well as the entanglement between NPO and PBO regulation reflecting the blurred boundary between the types of organizations such legal regulation applies to.

Studying Legal Regulation of Organized Civil Society Cross-Nationally

This chapter defines the basic concepts this study builds on (state privilege and constraint; legal inclusiveness and complexity) and, on this basis, proposes an analytical framework allowing for the cross-national analysis of the legal regulation applicable to the three types of voluntary organizations: interest groups, parties, and public benefit organizations. Specifically, the framework proposes a study organization-centred legal regulation by capturing regulation in the three stages of organizational formation, operation (organizations’ constitutive function and resources), and dissolution, by going beyond regulation that explicitly names the three organizational types (for example, political party), that uses a particular legal concept (for example, charity), or that regulates central organizational functions (for example, lobbying). This analytical framework underpins the construction of cross-national indicators across a wide range of regulatory target areas, which is detailed alongside the methods for analysis and the rationale for selecting the nineteen long-lived democracies covered.

The Functionalist Path towards a Constraining Legal Environment for Organized Civil Society

The UK represents the ‘functionalist path’ towards a constraining legal environment for voluntary organizations and contrasts strikingly with the Swedish scenario. Its long-term evolution has been characterized by the adoption of highly specific and constraining legislation by now applicable to charities, interest groups, and political parties, echoing broader tendencies associated with statutory legislation in common-law systems. Taking the democratic system’s long-term stability for granted, constraining legislation was adopted often with limited considerations of the possibly intrusive effects on civil society actors and without seeing the need to actively support voluntary organizations through a broader provision of direct state benefits.