State regulation of civil society is expanding yet widely
contested, often portrayed as illegitimate intrusion. Despite
ongoing debates about the nature of state-voluntary relations in
various disciplines, we know surprisingly little about why
long-lived democracies adopt more or less constraining legal
approaches in this sphere, in which state intervention is generally
considered contentious. Drawing on insights from political science,
sociology, comparative law as well as public administration
research, this book addresses this important question,
conceptually, theoretically, and empirically. It addresses the
conceptual and methodological challenges related to developing
systematic, comparative insights into the nature of complex legal
environments affecting voluntary membership organizations, when
simultaneously covering a wide range of democracies and the
regulation applicable to different types of voluntary
organizations. Proposing the analytical tools to tackle those
challenges, it studies in-depth the intertwining and overlapping
legal environments of political parties, interest groups, and
public benefit organizations across 19 long-lived democracies.
After presenting an innovative interdisciplinary theoretical
framework theorizing democratic states' legal disposition towards,
or their disinclination against, regulating voluntary membership
organizations in a constraining or permissive fashion, this
framework is empirically tested. Applying Qualitative Comparative
Analysis (QCA), the comparative analysis identifies three main
'paths' accounting for the relative constraints in the legal
environments democracies have created for organized civil society,
defined by different configurations of political systems'
democratic history, their legal family, and voluntary sector
traditions. Providing the foundation for a mixed-methods design,
three ideal-typical representatives of each path - Sweden, the UK,
and France - are selected for the in-depth study of these legal
environments' long-term evolution, to capture reform dynamics and
their drivers that have shaped group and party regulation over many
decades.
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