The Legal Environments of Organized Civil Society in Nineteen Democracies: A Cross-National Analysis

Abstract

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.