Covenants, Constitutions, and Distinct Law Types: Investigating Governments’ Restrictions on CSOs Using an Institutional Approach

DeMattee, Anthony J.

doi:10.1007/s11266-019-00151-2

Cited by 12 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 83 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…This is particularly true in the light of repeated electoral irregularities in Kenya—from mass postelection violence in 2008 to annulled presidential elections in 2017. Both may be related to the Kenyan government under Uhuru Kenyatta signaling a growing resistance to NGOs, particularly human rights and democratization NGOs—a trend that has become common around the world, as governments place restrictions on NGO activities (DeMattee, 2019; Dupuy & Prakash, 2020; Dupuy et al, 2016). The government of Uhuru Kenyatta, among other things, blamed NGOs for his being charged by the International Criminal Court in association with the 2008 postelection violence, refused to implement the NGO-lauded Public Benefits Organizations Act of 2013 despite orders from the Kenyan High Court in 2017, and instead periodically proposed very restrictive legislation on NGOs.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do Service Provision NGOs Perform Civil Society Functions? Evidence of NGOs’ Relationship With Democratic Participation

Brass

2021

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Scholars have long been interested in the relationship between civil society and democracy. Today, international donors promote civil society in developing countries, and they explicitly define civil society to include nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). It remains an open question, however, whether service provision NGOs in developing countries fulfill this civil society function. Some prominent scholarship argues that only NGOs that explicitly pursue advocacy perform civil society roles; service provision NGOs do not. I address this question, testing the relationship between individuals’ experience with, and perceptions of, NGOs and their political participation in voting, protests, and raising issues with public officials. Using data from Kenya, I find that individuals who report contact with, or positive views of, NGOs are more likely to engage in certain political activities, providing some evidence for the inclusion of NGOs in the concept of civil society. I theorize mechanisms by which service provision NGOs may affect various forms of participation.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do Service Provision NGOs Perform Civil Society Functions? Evidence of NGOs’ Relationship With Democratic Participation

Brass

2021

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…We have used this article to evaluate alternative explanations for salary differentials in low-information environments. Practitioners and analysts generally acknowledge that in developing countries, INGOs pay salary premiums that disrupt local labour markets and sometimes lead governments to enact policy that limits organisational autonomy (Cailhol et al, 2013;DeMattee, 2019aDeMattee, , 2019bDeMattee, , 2020Huff-Rousselle & Pickering, 2001;Kuah-Pearce & Guiheux, 2014;Lemay-Hébert et al, 2020;Pfeiffer, 2003). While it may be true that INGOs' salaries disrupt local labour markets, a lack of reliable information limits our ability to understand why such salary differentials exist.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Biases in low‐information environments: Understanding for‐profit and non‐profit salary differentials in Haiti

DeMattee

Rutherford

2021

J of Intl Development

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The Global South contains low-information environments that impose information search costs on organisations. We compare explanations for how employers make decisions in these environments. To do so, we analyse salaries collected from employers in Haiti, including local and international non-profits and domestic and foreign businesses.Although preliminary findings suggest that international non-governmental organisations pay above-market salaries, accounting for alternative explanations from behavioural economics causes the organisational form's importance to dissipate. We find that anchoring and framing mechanisms separately influence decision-making. These findings direct us to focus more on the actions and tools managers use to make decisions in low-information environments.

show abstract

“…The second implication is that laws are bundles of legal rules. It may be appropriate for researchers to study a specific rule, including rules limiting access to foreign funding or rules that allow governments to dissolve CSOs involuntarily (e.g., Bushouse et al, 2021; DeMattee, 2019a; Reddy, 2018). Yet single rule studies may be insufficient for bigger questions, such as how governments use laws to undermine civil society and retain power.…”

Section: Civil Society Lawsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A grammar of institutions for complex legal topics: Resolving statutory multiplicity and scaling up to jurisdiction‐level legal institutions

DeMattee

2022

Policy Studies Journal

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Laws are a unique type of primary data: they structure our everyday interactions and are publicly available to all people. How can we assess the law's effect when multiple overlapping and cross‐referencing statutes constrain and incentivize behavior simultaneously? I present a principled method for aggregating the legal rules coded in multiple laws into a single legal institution to help us understand and better characterize complex, interconnected, and sometimes contradictory bundles of legal rules. The method utilizes Institutional Grammar (IG), which scholars have used to code legal language into comparable institutional statements. The method is amenable to any legal topic and is especially appropriate when multiple statutes simultaneously comprise the legal institution in a single jurisdiction. To illustrate, I draw on the laws regulating civil society organizations (CS0s), which offer a valuable and substantively important prism to study legal texts as the cause of social phenomena or the outcome of a political process. I discuss my proposed method in three parts: first, why using IG enhances a coding instrument's validity; second, how an IG‐based instrument allows researchers to scale up coded values of separate laws into a jurisdiction‐level value; finally, I compare techniques for estimating descriptive measures of a jurisdiction's legal institution.

show abstract

Covenants, Constitutions, and Distinct Law Types: Investigating Governments’ Restrictions on CSOs Using an Institutional Approach

Cited by 12 publications

References 83 publications

Do Service Provision NGOs Perform Civil Society Functions? Evidence of NGOs’ Relationship With Democratic Participation

Do Service Provision NGOs Perform Civil Society Functions? Evidence of NGOs’ Relationship With Democratic Participation

Biases in low‐information environments: Understanding for‐profit and non‐profit salary differentials in Haiti

A grammar of institutions for complex legal topics: Resolving statutory multiplicity and scaling up to jurisdiction‐level legal institutions

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About