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Political Organisation in Transformation? The Impact of State Regulation on Parties, Interest Groups and NGOs in Advanced Democracies

Nicole Bolleyer, University of Exeter and Darren Halpin, Australian National University

Workshop Abstract

This workshop will explore the apparent convergence in how democratic states regulate the organisational form and capabilities of parties, interest groups and non-governmental organisations (NGOs). More particularly, it is interested in a) the comparative study of regulatory frameworks governing these membership-based, voluntary organisations including how these frameworks have changed over time and in b) the comparative study of similarities and differences in how these different organisational types respond to regulatory frameworks within and across countries. Various literatures have pointed to an increasing state regulation of voluntary organisations, inviting their professionalisation, centralisation and increasing dependency on state funds. More particularly, party research highlights parties’ transformation into ‘state institutions’ or ‘semi-public agencies’ (Epstein 1989; Katz and Mair 2009; Biezen 2012), while interest group scholars show how citizen groups turn into ‘protest businesses’, more interested in institutional funding than member support (Jordan & Maloney 1997; Bosso 2005; Halpin 2010). Finally, voluntary sector and civil society research have argued that volunteer associations turn into staff-driven ‘voluntary agencies’ delivering state services (DiMaggio & Anheier 1990; Hasenfeld & Gidron 2005; Billis 2010). These tendencies are problematic for democracy since they supposedly go hand in hand with the weakening of these organisations’ accountability towards citizens. Due to disciplinary divides, existing parallels in how the state tries to influence voluntary organisations such as parties, interest groups and welfare-providing NGOs and parallels in how these organisational types respond to state regulation have received only little attention so far (Bolleyer 2013). To bridge those divides, we aim at bringing scholars from the relevant subfields together to map out a) changes in state regulation across different organisational types and across democracies and b) assess regulations’ impact on organisations’ internal and external operations. This proposal is endorsed by both the ECPR Standing Group on Political Parties and the Standing Group on Interest Groups.

The Workshop’s Focus, its Foundations in Existing Research and its Relevance

This workshop targets two closely-tied questions that cut across several sub-disciplines and are highly salient: First, which regulatory frameworks are in place in advanced democracies to steer the behaviour of membership-based, voluntary organisations such as parties, interest groups and welfare-providing non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and how have these frameworks evolved over time and second, how do these regulatory frameworks affect voluntary organisations in their internal and external operations? Following Salamon and Anheier, this workshop focuses on organisations with a formalised infrastructure, that are private (separate from government), non-profit-distributing, self-governing and membership-based (1998: 216). To gain a broad perspective on state-voluntary relations, which enables us to integrate knowledge generated in different subfields, it covers interest groups, political parties and welfare-providing NGOs, three types of organisations that interact with the state at crucial stages of the political process: policy formulation, decision-making and policy delivery. 2

It has been highlighted in the literatures on these different types of organisations that state control over organised civil society is at odds with pluralist values, since it is supposed to weaken organisational linkages and accountability to citizens and thereby to reduce organisations’ beneficial effects for democracy. At the same time, the same literatures point to ‘their’ organisations’ increasing entanglement with or even control by the state. More particularly, party scholars argue that parties as organisations transform from voluntary associations into ‘public utilities’ (Epstein 1989; Biezen 2012) or even ‘institutions’ regulated and financed by the state (Katz & Mair 2009). Interest group experts observe the transformation of environmental groups into ‘protest businesses’ interested in institutional resources more than member contributions (Jordan and Maloney 1997 & 2007; Bosso 2005; Halpin 2010) and a new literature is exploring the way groups adapt their organisational form to such circumstances (Halpin & Jordan 2009; Halpin & Nownes 2011). Public policy scholars, welfare state experts and civil society scholars discuss the transformation of voluntary associations driven by citizens into staff-driven ‘voluntary agencies’ working for the state (Billis 2010; DiMaggio & Anheier 1990; Hasenfeld & Gidron 2005). Looking into comparative law, O’Halloran (2011) observed in reforms of charity law that governments increasingly specify which organisations ought to receive and how those ought to use public funds, strengthening organisational accountability to the state. The frameworks governing voluntary organisations have undergone change in many democracies (or reforms are discussed), reflecting on-going controversies around welfare reform, the capacity of organisations engaged in lobbying or religious activities to qualify for state support or the regulation of entitlements for party representatives taking over public office. In times of austerity, government cuts increase pressures on the voluntary sector to compensate for gaps in welfare provision (Bode 2011), while trust in parties and elected institutions and their capacity to represent citizens declines (Dalton 2003). Facing such changes, only an up-to-date overview of the current nature of these regulatory frameworks allows us to examine the wide-spread claim that the entanglement between voluntary organisations and the state compromises the latter’s autonomy and weakens their capacity to represent citizens.

Due to disciplinary divides, insights on organisations’ relationships to the state have so far remained disconnected, although they provide an ideal foundation for encompassing assessment of state-voluntary relations and their consequences for organisational life in advanced democracies (Bolleyer 2013a). This is a promising avenue for future research not least because the same phenomenon – intensifying state-voluntary relations - triggers opposite concerns across different subfields: Public policy and legal scholars worry about ‘mission drift’, i.e. governments’ limited capacity to assure that organisations use public funds as intended (e.g. Gazley & Brundney 2007; Hopt & van Hippel 2010). Civil society, voluntary sector and party scholars, in contrast, tend to worry about whether, when state-voluntary interpenetration is intense, citizens are still able to hold organisations accountable (e.g. Salamon 1987; Hasenfeld & Gidron 2005; Mair 2007).

Bringing together scholars working on interest groups, parties and NGOs, this workshop aims at an encompassing, systematic exploration of how democratic states try to influence organisational life, whether and how the state can assure organisational compliance and whether and how voluntary organisations can maintain their autonomy exposed to such pressures. Whatever concerns the papers contributed to such a workshop – if approved - substantiated, the repercussions would be considerable.

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Core Questions Addressed in the Workshop

The workshop targets the following conceptual, theoretical and empirical issues, which cross-cut several sub-disciplines in political science and can be systematised from two perspectives, a state- centred perspective that focuses on the nature of state regulation of organisational life in advanced democracies and an organisational-centred perspective that focuses on the comparative study of organisational responses to distinct regulatory environments instead.

Starting with a state-centred perspective, leading party scholars have argued that parties have become ‘legitimate objects of state regulation to a degree far exceeding what would normally be acceptable for private associations in a liberal society’ (Katz 2002: 90). Voluntary sector studies, in contrast, imply that the level of government control over welfare-providers is stronger than over other organisations (Kuhnle & Selle 1998). Without comparing the regulatory frameworks that apply to different organisational types, we will be unable to resolve such contradictions. More fundamentally, we will be unable to clarify whether democratic states take a coherent approach towards regulating different types or organisations (e.g. are generally more or less intrusive in terms of organisational regulation) or whether regulation is driven by the function of the particular organisation in the political process (e.g. party regulation is more intense than those of welfare-providing NGOs). While studies on corporate governance have developed cross-nationally applicable indices capturing the intensity of for-profit regulation (La Porta et al 2006; Djankov et al 2008), we still lack cross-national data and the analytical tools to capture the scope and intensity of regulation that apply to voluntary organisations. The comparative study of the corporative governance of nonprofits is still in its infancy (Hoppt & von Hippel 2010). At the same time, various specialist literatures refer to the similar categories on which such a comparative scheme could be built: first, the nature and scope of privileges granted to organisations (distinguishing rights from financial resources), second, the nature and scope of constraints or obligations (distinguishing those affecting organisations’ internal life from those affecting their external activities) and third, the type of body vested with the enforcement of regulations (governmental or judicial) including supervision mechanisms used (van Biezen 2012; Gauja 2010; Garton 2009; O’Halloran 2011; Kuhnle & Selle 1998; Salamon & Flaherty 1996; Yishai 1998). Consequently, one fundamental question this workshop will ask is how we can develop concepts and measures that allow us to capture the intensity of state interference in organisational life across VO type and political system.

Moving to the organisation-centred perspective that focuses on how organisations respond to regulatory frameworks (or their environment more generally), scholars in various literatures have raised the question whether there are shared patterns of institutionalisation driven by contextual pressures that cross-cut organisational type (see Torry (2005) on religious groups; Katz & Mair (2009) on parties; Jordan & Maloney (2007) on interest groups; Davies (2011) on welfare- providing organisations and or political organisation generally Wilson (1973); Knoke (1988)). Despite its recurrence, the question has remained unanswered. Similarly, various literatures have stressed the importance of contextual, isomorphic pressures that push societal organisations (as well as governmental structures) operating in a sector or taking over institutional roles to adapt and develop similar structures and strategies (DiMaggio & Powell 1983; Frumkin & Galaskiewicz 2004; Bolleyer 2013b). Responding to such caveats, the workshop will ask to what extent institutional pressures generally ‘streamline’ organisations operating in the same institutional 4

setting or whether functional differences between organisational types lead to distinct organisational behaviour and developmental patterns.

Those answers will have crucial normative repercussions regarding voluntary organisations’ capacity to provide a linkage between citizens and the political system. Professionalisation, for instance, is often thought to weaken organisations’ capacity to assure citizen involvement. Yet although VOs are under increasing pressure to professionalise (confronted with the ‘marketisation’ of welfare or with increasingly volatile electorates), the role of professionalisation is little theorised, e.g. it is unclear under which conditions full-time staff support, participate in or take over intra-organisational decision-making, and issue crucial to evaluate the impact of professionalisation on organisations’ democratic potential. Similarly, dependency on the state - that increasingly professionalised and institutionalised organisations are expected to embrace since losing state funding is more threatening for the organisation than losing some members - is supposed to invite cooptation. Such cooptation is supposed to weaken organisational advocacy for member interests, especially when those are in conflict with government priorities. While the evolution of voluntary organisations from an ‘expressive’ to an ‘instrumental’ orientation and from ‘advocacy’ to ‘service provision’ has been much debated (Larsson 2011), it is still unresolved whether voluntary organisations face a zero-sum game between advocacy and service provision for the state (Hasenfeld & Gidron 2005; Defourny & Pestoff 2008) or, in the case of parties, a trade-off between responsiveness to members and functional efficiency when operating in state institutions (Bolleyer 2013b). Finally, debate continues as to the norms that ought to guide assessments of interest group democratic accountability (Halpin 2006). To explore these tensions more closely, this workshop looks at organisational dynamics and evolutionary tendencies across organisational types exposed to different regulatory environments.

These caveats lead to a set of core questions which the workshop plans to discuss:

- How can we comparatively assess the intensity of state regulation of different organisational types and across democracies? Can we develop concepts and measures that travel organisational type and context? - Has state regulation of organisational life really become more intense in advanced democracies over the last decades and to which extent has the growth of obligations imposed on organisations been matched by the granting of privileges by the state? - Do democratic states take a coherent approach towards regulating different types of voluntary organisation or do regulatory choices reflect the function of these organisations in the political process? - How do organisations respond to increasing state regulation? Do we find similar trends in interest groups, parties and welfare-providing NGOs? - More particularly, are tensions evident between organisations’ increasing professionalisation and growing dependency on state funds on the one hand and the accountability to their members on the other as suggested in various specialist literatures? Are the organisational features and democratic practices of voluntary organisations different in differing regulatory settings?

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Paper Givers

We equally invite specialists on interest groups, parties and NGOs interested in the above questions. We are predominantly interested in comparative papers, taking either a state-centred or organisation-centred perspective (or both) as detailed above. Taking a state-centred perspective, this can include comparative explorations of the regulation of different organisational types within the same democracy or cross-national explorations of state regulation of the same organisational type or – in the ideal case - both. Taking an organisation-centred perspective, we are interested in comparative explorations how different organisational types respond to the regulatory frameworks they operate in, whether we find similar developmental patterns (e.g. trends towards professionalisation, centralisation, functional reorientation towards service delivery) reflecting similar regulatory environments or, alternativelythe organisations’ similar functions in the political process.

Workshop Directors

Nicole Bolleyer is a Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Exeter. She was a Lecturer at the University of Mannheim and received a PhD in political science from the EUI in Florence. She studied at the Johns Hopkins University, held a Marie Curie fellowship at Leiden University and was recently an Alexander van Humboldt research fellow at the University of Cologne. Nicole has published in the European Journal of Political Research, European Political Science Review, Governance, Party Politics, West European Politics, Comparative European Politics, Political Studies, Publius and Regional and Federal Studies. Her first monograph Intergovernmental Cooperation – Rational Choices in Federal Systems and Beyond was published by Oxford University Press in 2009. Her second monograph New Parties in Old Party Systems: Persistence and Decline in 17 Democracies is forthcoming with the same publisher. Her research has been funded by the EU, the British Academy, the Economic and Social Research Council (UK), the Humboldt Foundation (Germany) and the Flemish Science Foundation (Belgium).

Darren Halpin is Reader in Policy Studies at the Australian National University. He has previously been Assoc. Professor at the University of Aarhus (Denmark) and Professor of Public Policy at the Robert Gordon University (UK) (where he currently holds the position of Visiting Professor). Darren is the Founding Editor of the Book Series Interest Groups, Advocacy and Democracy (Palgrave, UK) and is on the editorial team of the new journal Interest Groups and Advocacy (Palgrave, UK). His work has been published in Governance, Public Administration, Political Studies, British Journal of Political Science, Journal of Public Policyand the Journal of European Public Policy. His most recent monograph Groups, Democracy and Representation: Between Promise and Practice, came out with Manchester University Press. He has a book forthcoming with Routledge tentatively entitled Interest Group Organisations: Evolution, Form and Capacity. He has received project funding from the Leverhulme Trust, British Academy, Economic and Social Research Council (UK) and the Danish Research Council.

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