As the quality of democracy declines around the world—including in democracies like the United States and Poland—the role and function of civil society organizations become even more important to understand. We know from decades of research on democratic development that organized civil society is one of the few spaces that can potentially promote, strengthen, and advocate for more robust democratic systems. Further, since the 1980s, state services and budgets have been cut in many European and North American nations. Nonprofit and public benefit (or charity) organizations are often called on to pick up the slack. At the same time, citizens around the world are increasingly less engaged in the organized sphere and more distrustful of politicians and governments. To understand the complex interplay of these issues, it is important to investigate the relationship between civil society and the state in complicated political and economic environments.
Nicole Bolleyer’s well-organized book addresses one void in our understanding of these issues: the regulatory framework that governs political parties, interest groups, and public benefit organizations. She reminds us that state regulation of the voluntary sector is important in that it defines what is possible in the civic sphere. In other words, the legal framework that regulates these organizations will determine if they can improve the quality of democracy and effectively provide services to citizens amid fiscally constrained budgets. In this extremely comprehensive and thorough tome, the author is able to view these governing environments across organizations and across countries, with a focus on Southern and Western Europe, as well as the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The mere scope of her analysis, combined with a detailed documentation of the codes that regulate the civic sector, is an impressive contribution to our understanding of civil society in established democracies.
One of the book’s most important contributions is the meticulous descriptions of the legal frameworks that regulate the three kinds of organizations in the 19 “long-standing” democracies. Bolleyer’s thorough review of these frameworks, including the kind of monitoring agency that oversees the work, harks back to the origins of comparative political studies. As such, the book is a valuable addition to the more current neo-institutionalist literature, as well as the growing field of comparative legal studies.
In undertaking this careful analysis, Bolleyer makes two observations. First, by moving beyond studies that focus on one kind of organization, she is able to employ a “legal inclusive” framework, which explores how the same regulation applies to different kinds of organizations simultaneously. This allows her to uncover previously hidden complexities in the legal code that affect the ability of organizations both to form and operate. For example, research on political parties might focus on political party law, when, in fact, in many of these nations’ political parties are a kind of nonprofit organization. Focusing on party-specific rules misses some of the ways that states regulate these organizations under the larger umbrella of nonprofit law. Importantly, this overlap in civil society organization (CSO) law is often unintentional and perhaps not even understood by lawmakers themselves.
The second observation is that legal frameworks differ according to the distinct phases in the life of an organization. Bolleyer breaks these phases into three categories: formation, operation, and dissolution. She is then able to closely examine laws in light of each phase, demonstrating that regulating the operations of one particular kind of nonprofit organization—for example, lobby organizations—will have unexpected effects on other kinds of organizations like public benefit organizations.
The implications of these findings are important and unexplored; it would be interesting to think more about how these unintended webs of regulation are affecting the ability of these organizations to undertake their work, whether it is in the guise of service provision or political advocacy. Further, to what extent can or should these findings be shared with those making the regulations that are having these unintentional effects? Can or should lawmakers be alerted to these overlaps, or are the overall effects of her observations relatively benign?
Next, Bolleyer moves on to the cross-national analysis of legal frameworks to detect patterns of “legal disposition” over time. She asks: Do countries tend to be more or less constraining (or permissive) when regulating CSOs? The analysis of the laws allows Bolleyer to develop a complex Legal Regulation Index, which scores the 19 countries and then ranks them from most constrained to most permissive (p. 173). The index is founded on impressive logic and precision, an undertaking made possible by the careful attention to detail and the innate complexities that define this work.
Interestingly, the results of this index show that some Northern European countries (Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, and Norway) have more permissive legal environments, whereas Ireland, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States place more constraints on the civil society sector. To a casual observer, this may seem counterintuitive. The countries with more permissive environments tend to have more state oversight and involvement in many spheres, such as environmental and social services, than countries like the United States and the United Kingdom, which have slowly eroded regulatory frameworks in many areas (especially financial).
To better understand the index scores, Bolleyer asks why some countries have more or less constraining legal environments. In other words, she explores the conditioning factors that determine the nature of the environment, which allows her to explain these counterintuitive results. Bolleyer develops a typology of five conditions: legitimizing (experiences in democratic stability and the nature of the voluntary sector regime), reinforcing (the nature of the legal system), and facilitating (the decision-making and administrative capacities of the regime). Using this typology, she employs qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) to determine which conditions are either necessary or sufficient for the observed outcomes (p. 190).
Again, the meticulous attention to detail leads to some interesting findings. As would be expected, no condition alone can explain the observed outcomes; rather she identifies combinations of conditions that explain more constrained and permissive regulatory frameworks. She determines that several “paths” toward these outcomes exist and that the combination of legitimizing conditions (experience with democracy) and reinforcing conditions (legal family) is particularly important in explaining the observed outcomes. Specifically, experiences with democratic instability and corporatist voluntary sector regimes—read postwar Germany—will lead to more constraining regulatory environments for the voluntary sector.
This part of the analysis is the boldest and most creative yet, at the same time, the least satisfying. To understand these paths, Bolleyer is contributing to our understanding of the underlying environments that explain legal norms in general, moving beyond the three specific kinds of organizations. However, the framework might serve the goal of theory development more effectively with more parsimony. To truly develop a mid-range theory of state regulations of civil society organizations in long-established democracies, a slightly more concise framework may garner more analytical leverage.
The issue of theory development leads to another question about the case selection and the generalizability of the findings. Bolleyer narrows the country cases by focusing on stable democratic systems since World War II (p. 47). This limits the cases to mostly EU cases. As someone who writes about Latin America and the developing world, I immediately wondered why she chose this particular focus. Would expanding the geographic scope to stable democracies not in North American or European environments (Costa Rica) and since the postwar independence movement (India) provide additional analytic leverage? Would the finding about democratic instability as an important factor in explaining the outcome be better understood if countries with actual experience with instability (Chile) were evaluated? What else might we learn about the state–civil society relationship by exploring these cases?
It would also be interesting to explore the implications of these paths. How does a constraining path affect the work of political parties in places like France and Germany? Are they still able to channel citizens’ political demands? Can public interest organizations represent their members in the same way or provide effective services? In other words, how do these paths affect the quality of democracy and service provision?
In sum, the book provides a variety of empirical and theoretical contributions about many unexplored and previously hidden ways that the state and civil society interact in established democracies. Bolleyer’s careful logic and evidence about three kinds of organizations in 19 countries are exemplary. Her use of QCA can also provide a model to new scholars who are interested in this particular methodological tool. Overall, I recommend this book for scholars who are interested in best understanding civil society, including political parties, in democratic nations.
