Studying the shrinking and expansion of civil society space in Europe

Various studies have highlighted a worrying trend: many regimes – including established democracies – increasingly adopt legal provisions that curtail civil society organizations’ (CSOs) capacity to survive, operate, and perform key tasks, i.e. provisions that delimit CSOs’ room for manoeuvre or, as we call it, legally defined civil society space. This article presents a new dataset covering annual change in CSO regulation across 12 European countries (2000–2022). It enables us – based on 321 indicators – to map the evolving complexity and multidimensionality of CSOs’ legal environments in 12 legal domains, encompassing regulation of CSO existence, resource access, CSO voice, and rights infrastructures to monitor and contest government action. Alongside the growth of both legal obligations and benefits, our data suggest a pronounced increase in obligations regulating CSO voice, an area critical for CSOs to play a political role in democracies. To highlight how the dataset can be used as a toolkit in future research, we present three exemplary applications. We explore the co-evolution of obligations and benefits in CSO resource regulation and regulatory redundancies across legal domains. Finally, we translate two distinct normative conceptions of freedom of speech regulation into qualitative measures, distinguishing provisions designed to restrict from those intended to protect a pluralist democratic society.