NGOs under authoritarian rule: stabilizers or challengers?
Under competitive authoritarianism, a form of hybrid regime in which political “competition is real but unfair” (Levitsky & Way, 2010, p. 12), non- governmental organisations (NGOs) and other civic organisations are at least partially allowed to organise and act. At the same time, due to the existence of formally democratic institutions, such as councils, committees and courts, they become potential challengers to authoritarianism. According to the common wisdom of research on authoritarian regimes, however, institutions regularly function as effective regime stabilisers as long as power holders correctly evaluate power, challenges and credibility. The common assumption that institutions are self-enforcing structures that mainly change as a result of external shocks has important implications for theorising on the role of NGOs under authoritarian rule. Most notably, scholars who base their work on this underlying assumption view NGOs as caught in institutional straightjackets; their actual preferences, activities and contributions are thus regularly left unexplored.
Taking this research gap as a starting point, and drawing on a theoretical school that understands institutions as ambivalent arenas of competing interests (Hacker, 2004; Mahoney & Thelen, 2010), my dissertation project assumes that NGOs are capable of strategic action and thus relevant objects of study. It explores whether and to what extent institutional constraints – conceptualised as (1) status-quo bias of the political environment and (2) enforcement capabilities of implementing actors – influence the strategy formation of NGOs, and how NGOs can trigger processes of institutional change in competitive authoritarian regimes.
My project compares two least likely cases, i.e. cases in which the scope conditions make me expect that the predictions of the original theory (that has been developed for and empirically “tested” in democracies) might not work. Armenia (as a stable competitive authoritarian regime) and Georgia (as an unstable/democratizing one) serve as the two country cases. The role of NGOs in two exemplary cases of change will be analysed: (a) the development of a probation service as part of criminal justice reform (change through action), and (b) the lacking adaption of social services for elderly despite dramatic demographic challenges (change through neglect).
The project mainly draws on 60 semi-structured interviews with the directors of NGOs, government officials, and representatives of international organisations, and 10 expert interviews conducted in the Southern Caucasus in the summer and autumn of 2013.