The Shrinking Civil Society Space

Two scholars presented a really interesting paper a few weeks ago at a philanthropy conference sponsored by the Urban Institute and the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy.  The paper, Authoritarianism in US State Politics and its Impact on Nonprofit Civil Liberties uses a model typically applied to other countries as a measure of “civil society space” in those other countries.  We like to think such measures are useful in places where civil society is not treated as well as we here in America treat it. 

By “space,” it is meant the extent of freedoms charities and other nonprofits enjoy as they pursue the public benefit. The paper proves that at the state level we too are constricting civil society space.  The paper doesn’t explicitly address the motivations for state efforts to shrink civil society, but the data and case study in the paper make it plain that states restrict civil society when they just don’t like what organizations say or believe. Or when they act on those beliefs in legitimate and legal ways.  Like providing food and shelter to an immigrant who crossed the border miles, days or even months ago.  Increasingly, states don’t like that and are enacting laws to restrict the space in which civil society may feed or house immigrants.  Or provide homeless people with hot meals, or an addict with clean needles, or bail money for an indigent defendant.  Some states hate all of that and want civil society to shut up and sit down.  

Here is a short excerpt from the paper’s introduction:

Civil society work has always involved organizing marginalized voices, such as settlement houses serving undocumented immigrants in the 19th century and the wave of Progressive reform that followed into the 20th century. So, some part of civil society work has also involved hard decisions about operating on the margins of illicit work to deepen democracy and further social change. But the current context for new restrictions on civil society activity is unique.  Across the globe, there has been a selective closure of civic space driven by factors such as climate change, global geopolitical instability, and a gradual rise in authoritarianism and right-wing populism (Biekart et al. 2023; CIVICUS 2023; Freedom House 2019). In the wake of weakening support for democratic principles, right-wing populist governments have strengthened their control by limiting dissent among civil society actors. The resulting dynamic has been variously referenced as “civil society capture” (Moder and Pranzl 2019), “democratic backsliding” (Bermeo 2016), “shrinking space for civil society” (Anheier and Toepler 2019), and a “third wave of autocratization” (Lührmann and Lindberg 2018). 

The capacity of governments to impose restrictions on civil society is widely documented in unstable democracies but repressive efforts have substantially increased in the established democracies of Western Europe and the United States since the 1990s (Arvanitopoulos 2022; Eikenberry 2019). Democracy indicators have been declining worldwide, including in Europe and North America (CIVICUS 2023; Gorokhovskaia et al. 2023). And these trends matter to civil society organizations because democracy indicators are linked to associational activity (Fung 2003). However, little of this research has yet addressed the possibility that autocracy has already reached America’s door and that we have already transitioned from “liberal democracy” to “defective democracy” at least in some parts of our political system (Cassani and Tomini 2019). When the lens focuses on more radical forms of organizing, such as through social movements, the scholarship becomes even more scarce (Mati et al. 2016).  This question becomes even more complex in a federalist system when some levels of government have delegitimized associational activity that is still promoted at other levels. 

This paper focuses on the actions of conservative U.S. states to limit civil society activity through statutory and executive authority. We focus mainly on state action because states are the most active regulators of nonprofit activity, and because states have an outsized impact on local government-nonprofit interactions through the doctrine of “preemption”.

darryll k. jones