Title: Right-wing Populism, Crisis Exposure and the Restrictiveness of Civil Society Regulation in Europe
Nicole Bolleyer, LMU & Gabriel Katz, University of Exeter
Abstract: This paper theorizes and empirically analyzes under which conditions the crises to which EU member states have been exposed over the last 20 years function as drivers of the increased restrictiveness of civil societies’ legal environments as frequently argued by practitioners and scholars alike. We argue that these major crises, as exemplified by domestic terrorism and the Covid-19 pandemic, involve governments’ handling of trade-offs between fundamental values/entitlements (e.g. liberty vs. security) that citizens expect governments to guarantee simultaneously. They push governments to make choices between alternatives all of which are normatively problematic and therefore tend to trigger societal contestation. While these crises in themselves create incentives towards the reconfiguration of democracies’ legal infrastructures in favour of enhanced government control over societal actors (i.e. increasing restrictiveness) irrespective of governments’ ideological orientations, crises responses are inevitably coloured by the latter. The implications of these crises on democracies’ legal architecture are thus theorized in conjunction with how right-wing populist parties in government condition theoretically expected crisis effects. We examine our hypotheses using the ‘Legal Change Dataset’ compiled by the CIVILSPACE project covering 12 countries from 2000-2022, to test empirically to which extent ‘objective’ crisis exposure - as compared to government preferences - is a main driver of democracies’ tendencies to adopt civil society restrictions.