Consultation, Co-Optation, and Crackdown

How Participation in Authoritarian-Dominated International Organizations Shapes Civil Society

Abstract

A growing body of research currently demonstrates that state membership in authoritarian-dominated regional and international organizations (ROs and IOs) can weaken the prospects for political liberalization and can serve to bolster autocratic regime stability. Concurrently, over the past decade, the regulatory environment for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) has become increasingly restricted, particularly in authoritarian regimes where autocrats wield anti-civil society regulations in order to maintain and increase regime stability. NGOs play an important role in international policymaking, often holding consultative or voting roles in various types of IOs. Given the increasing restriction of civil society in authoritarian states, what role do NGOs play in authoritarian-oriented IOs? In this paper, I explore two questions related to authoritarian stability, civil society, and international organizations: (1) how does membership in authoritarian IOs shape states’ domestic civil society regulations, and (2) how do states use NGOs in authoritarian IOs to protect and enhance regime stability? I explore these questions with cross-national quantitative data from the Varieties of Democracy project and two qualitative case studies of NGOs working with authoritarian IOs.

Code

All the raw code and data for this paper is available in a GitHub repository.