Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Is the global associational revolution (Salamon, 1993) becoming undone? Foreign funding restrictions to NGOs are on the rise not only in authoritarian regimes but also among democracies and aid-dependent countries.

Paper long abstract

This study investigates the rise of legislative restrictions on foreign funding to NGOs, a global trend occurring not only in aid-dependent, non-democratic regimes but also more recently in developed economies and democracies. Do foreign funding restrictions reflect pushback to civil society, or are they part of the natural development process? What explains the rise of foreign funding restrictions? To answer these questions, I use cross-national panel data from 1993-2022, polynomial interpolation, logistic regression, and survival analysis to examine variables related to foreign funding restrictions, in particular, foreign aid, natural resource extraction, and democracy. By collapsing the wide variety of cases into regime type, and within regime type, differentiating between resource-rich countries, I provide explanations for legislative restrictions across diverse political and economic contexts, and pays close attention to the paradox of the rise of foreign funding restrictions in developing country democracies. The presence of the extractive industry is significant across regime types and even in democracies in particular as the majority of countries with restrictions are resource-rich. With the trend of ongoing foreign aid reductions, the NGO model of aid delivery may become increasingly resource-constrained, with reduced internal support in a context of rising populism. This trend may be more acute in resource-rich developing democracies, where ultra-wealthy individuals may be more likely to influence civil society from within.