ERC Project - CIVILSPACE: The Shrinking Space for Civil Society in Europe

Long considered a problem of 'third countries', concerns about 'shrinking civil society space' have by now moved to the heart of the European Union. Confronted with severe challenges such as domestic terrorism, numerous member states have passed legislation constraining civil society organizations (CSOs) in recent decades. CIVILSPACE (101001458) proposes the first theoretization and comprehensive assessment of the drivers and repercussions of the evolution and possibly shrinking of legal space of CSOs in EU member states. It approaches the impact on CSO law of major crises (e.g. domestic terrorism, the Eurozone crisis, the migration crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic) as mediated by member states’ historically grown dispositions towards regulating civil society in a more restrictive or more permissive fashion. CSO responses to changes in CSO law, in turn, are expected to be shaped not only by 'objective' changes in the restrictiveness or the permissiveness of legislation (and their implementation). They are expected to be shaped by whether CSOs perceive themselves as being targeted by legal change, a perception affected by whom and in which situations restrictive legislation is adopted. To address these important themes, the project addresses the two main questions:

How and why have EU member states altered the legal environments of CSOs over the last two decades?
​
How do legal differences shape CSO activities central to assuring legal and political equality within organized civil society?

The theoretical framework on the drivers and organizational repercussions of 'legally defined' civil society space will be examined through two work packages. Work Package 1 measures the evolving restrictiveness of legislation in twelve member states from 2000-2022. Importantly, it covers both framework legislation across a range of domains regulating CSO formation, CSO resource access and the rights infrastructure available to CSOs in general, as well as provisions tailored to specific CSO types (e.g. migrant organizations, unions). This data will allow for the first comprehensive statistical analyses of what drives the changing legal restrictiveness of CSOs' legal environments. It will allow us to disentangle whether the latter ought to be understood as democratic governments' response to their countries' exposure to problem pressure or whether change foremost aligns with governments' or citizens' own preferences prevalent in different member states. Informed by Work Package 1, Work Package 2a selects a subset of countries for case studies (covering typical and outlier cases) to examine qualitatively how public authorities implement CSO legislation. This is complemented in Work Package 2b by large-scale CSO surveys with an in-built experiment to examine CSOs' responses to different legal environments considering law-conforming and chilling effects of regulation and how they impact especially on CSOs' political activities.