Elizabeth A. Bloodgood

National Styles of NGO Regulation

Why do Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries vary in their regulatory approach toward nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)? This article introduces an index to assess NGO regulation regarding barriers to entry, NGOs’ political capacity, and economic activity. Our cross-section analysis of 28 OECD countries offers preliminary evidence of systematic differences in NGO regulation between corporatist and pluralist systems. We suggest corporatist systems have more restrictive regulations because NGOs risk upsetting the political order and managed social consensus. In pluralist countries, NGOs face fewer restrictions because governments view them as substitutes for formal communication channels. We present two cases, Japan (corporatist) and the United States (pluralist), to illustrate this argument. In sum, macroinstitutional arrangements of political representation have a crucial bearing on national styles of NGO regulation. Future uses of this index include examining the effects of national context on international NGOs (INGOs), explaining variations in organizational structures and strategies among NGOs, and tracking variations in NGO–state relations over time.

Does government funding depoliticize non-governmental organizations? Examining evidence from Europe

Prior work suggests that government funding can encourage non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to engage in political advocacy and public policy. We challenge this finding and examine two theoretical explanations for the dampening effect of government funding on NGO lobbying. First, donors are known to discipline NGO activity via an implicit or explicit threat to withdraw funding should the organization become too radical or political. Second, NGOs with more radical political agendas are less willing to seek or accept government funding for fear this will limit or delegitimize their activities. Using data from the European Union’s Transparency Register, we find that the share of government funding in NGO budgets is negatively associated with lobbying expenditure. This effect is statistically significant and substantial, which provides a reason for concern about NGO resource dependence. Even when governments are motivated by honorable intentions, their financial assistance has the (unintended) effect of dampening NGOs’ political activity.

Transnational Advocacy Networks: A Complex Adaptive Systems Simulation Model of the Boomerang Effect

We examine the costs and benefits of nongovernmental organization (NGO) networking using a complex systems approach and agent-based modeling to simulate the effects of NGOs’ efforts to seek influence in policy making at home and abroad. We elaborate on the boomerang model developed by Keck and Sikkink and uncover macro-level effects of multiple NGOs networking for policy influence in multiple states around multiple positions on the same issue simultaneously. The results of our model and simulations lead us to argue that the boomerang effect has interesting unexplored implications for NGO behavior and state policy worthy of further empirical testing. We find that networking is necessary for NGOs to change state policy but leads to a higher likelihood of organizational collapse for NGOs. Although networking leads to policy change, as is well demonstrated within existing literature, our model suggests that efficacy comes at a cost to NGOs, which should make analysts and academics more ambivalent about the advisability of NGO networking.