A red flag for public goods? The correlates of civil society restrictions

Abstract

Governments increasingly restrict civil society organizations (CSOs). Different theories converge on the expectation that CSOs are important for public goods. A largely unexplored implication is that increased restrictions on CSOs will signal the under-delivery of public goods. Using data on government-imposed restrictions on CSOs for a global sample of countries, we test this implication. Controlling for unobserved cross-country heterogeneity, temporal shocks, and confounding variables, we find that the accumulation of restrictions on CSOs negatively correlate with public goods-oriented government spending and positively correlate with corruption and clientelism in the future. Our evidence also suggests that the mechanism underpinning these findings is that persistent restrictions on CSOs negatively correlate with engaged society and, to some extent, protest. While global governance actors warn of the negative consequences of restrictions on CSOs, our analyses provide evidence that restrictions are indeed a red flag for governments' failure to live up to their public goods commitment.