1 National Styles of NGO Regulation

This paper examines how and why democratic OECD countries vary in their regulatory approach towards non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in terms of: (1) barriers to entry, (2) the constraints on NGOs ’ ability to combine remunerative service provision activities with non-remunerative advocacy activities, and (3) the constraints on receiving funds from non-traditional sources. We hypothesize that governments in corporatist systems will tend to create a restrictive regulatory context for NGOs ’ emergence and functioning because NGOs present a potential risk for upsetting the political order and managed social consensus. In contrast, in pluralist countries, NGOs will face fewer regulatory restrictions because governments will view them as agents articulating the preferences of a range of societal interests, and serving as information sources where formal communication channels are lacking. Our comparative analysis of corporatist (Japan and Sweden) and pluralistic democracies (United States and Australia) suggests that in contrast to pluralist systems, governments are likely to strictly regulate NGOs in corporatist societies where the structures of interest representation are well established and closed to outside influence. In sum, our paper suggests that macro institutional arrangements of political representation have a crucial bearing on national styles of NGO regulation. NGOs are not independent of the state, as the phrase non-governmental tends to suggest. Rather, their emergence and functioning is often significantly influenced by the state and macro political arrangements.