Anthony J. DeMattee

Research Questions: This work conducts three interrelated analyses exploring the factors that lead governments to add permissive or restrictive rules to the laws that regulate civil society organizations (CSOs) within their borders. The analysis asks first, do nondemocratic regimes with autocratic institutions enact permissive provisions? Second, do laws currently on the books predict the types of new legal provisions that governments enact? If so, does that relationship change concerning new permissive and restrictive provisions? Third, when governments enact new legal provisions, are these changes associated with the circumstances and ideologies in other jurisdictions, namely neighboring African countries and global hegemons? 

Theoretical Framework: Policy diffusion, which is the inter-jurisdictional influence that one government's policy decision has on changing the probability of adoption by the remaining pool of non-adopters (Simmons et al. 2006; Strang 1991). For a recent application in Law & Society Review see "How Their Laws Affect our Laws" (Cook-Martín and FitzGerald 2019).

Data: An original dataset created by collecting, translating, and systematically coding a legal corpus of 285 statues enacted by 17 governments between 1872 and 2019. These cases include 12 East African countries and the five Permanent Members of the U.N. Security Council. A novel application of the highly-cited ADICO syntax (Crawford and Ostrom 1995) underpins the creation and use of a 58-item coding protocol. 

Methods: I transform the country-year data into a directed-dyad format to study the intrajurisdictional diffusion of CSO laws. Using a directed-dyad event history analysis approach allows me to control for the unequal levels of influence that neighboring countries and global hegemons have on East African governments. The data and modeling choice also allow me to study the institutional development of CSO laws in countries while controlling for pathdependency, domestic factors, and international influence.

Contributions to the Field: To understand how and why governments regulate CSOs, we must understand the conditions under which governments choose to enact permissive or restrictive legal provisions. Specifically, this means knowing which factors predict the direction and size of institutional change. Shortcomings in existing research led me to evolve my analysis in three meaningful ways. First, I use two response variables: one measures restrictive changes and the other permissive ones. Second, I replace binary response variables with continuous ones. Rather than treating all changes to the regulatory regime as the same (binary) or arbitrarily clumping different sizes together (counts), continuous response variables accurately measure the direction and magnitude of the year-over-year change to the regulatory regime. Finally, I study the addition and removal of over 50 legal provisions while accounting for differences in international commitments and constitutions as preexisting intuitions. Treaties represent preexisting constitutional rules, while current provisions represent preexisting collective-choice rules embodied in laws (Buchanan and Tullock 1961; Ostrom 2005). This new understanding of civil society laws and CSO regulatory regimes raises the stakes for researchers and practitioners. As a methodological contribution, it shows it is possible to rigorously and systematically code statutes and other legal sources for comparative analysis.

References

Buchanan, James M., and Gordon Tullock. 1961. The Calculus of Consent. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 
Cook-Martín, David, and David Scott FitzGerald. 2019. "How Their Laws Affect our Laws: Mechanisms of Immigration Policy Diffusion in the Americas, 1790–2010." Law & Society Review 53 (1):41-76.
Crawford, Sue E. S., and Elinor Ostrom. 1995. "A Grammar of Institutions." The American Political Science Review 89 (3):582.
Ostrom, Elinor. 2005. Understanding Institutional Diversity. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Simmons, Beth A., Frank Dobbin, and Geoffrey Garrett. 2006. "Introduction: The International Diffusion of Liberalism." International Organization 60 (4):781-810.
Strang, David. 1991. "Adding Social Structure to Diffusion Models:An Event History Framework." Sociological Methods & Research 19 (3):324-53.