This Paper Looks at Ngos in a Comparative Context

Constitutional Arrangements and the Structure of Civil Society: Still Relevant after all of these years?

Jennifer L. Bailey

Dept. of Sociology and Political Science

Norwegian University of Science and Technology[1]

This paper looks at NGOs in a comparative context. It asks whether the landscape of NGOs within the industrialized western democracies varies by countries in ways that fit with be broad constitutional configurations of those countries. Much comparative politics literature has focused on the constitutional differences among these countries, other literature focuses on differences in relations between the state and the market (Schmidt 2002); still others look at the formal relationships of labor-business and the state. This paper places the emphasis most squarely on other actors in this governance of societies: interest groups. More specifically, the paper examines interests groups that fall outside of the focus on traditional interest groups. It looks exclusively at advocacy groups, here, environmental advocacy groups. For simplicity and in agreement with much popular usage, these will here be called Environmental Non-Governmental Organizations (ENGOs).

Does the landscape of environmental advocacy groups vary to fit the differences in constitutions? There are many reasons why it should: the key idea of the “political opportunity structure” is that they “influence the choice of protest strategies and the impact of social movements on their environment” (Kitschelt 1986). A country’s constitution (in the broader sense of the nature of its governing institutions) is a description of the distribution of power within a country. Groups that seek to influence the policies that emerge from these structures should in some be impacted by their engagement with them. Governments make laws and arrangements that shape and regulate these groups, usually in such ways that existing structures are privileged. Advocacy groups must conform in order to legal and to have influence. Finally, to the extent that the existing structures of government are legitimate, groups that engage with them and mirror them are more likely to be seen as legitimate as well.

There are other reasons why we should not expect any significant variation. First, advocacy groups are a part of the “new social movements” that consciously sought to avoid replicating the old ways of doing things. They were consciously anti-establishment. Second, these are often a part of international movements. They are a part of an increasingly globalized civil society, and many work closely with organizations from a variety of other countries on a regular basis. This suggests that they may absorb as many impulses – including institutional imperatives -- from international or foreign contexts as from their home countries. Finally, we may legitimately ask whether the famous constitutional differences among the western democracies are really significant any longer. This is especially the case for those many industrial democracies increasing enmeshed in the European Union. The latter turns out to be surprisingly contested and tricky question, which is surprising given the amount of ink devoted to elucidating these distinctions in the general literature.

To investigate these questions, this paper will focus on the United States and Norway. These two states are representative of different constitutional configurations as well as distinctive ideological traditions about the proper relationship between the state and civil society. The paper will first pin down the relevant constitutional features – or Political Opportunity Structures – and then turn to what I am calling the ENGOs landscape. By this I mean the general configuration of the ENGO community: the number and type of the NGOs that exist. For reasons of space and time, the focus here is on only these two countries. However, in order to draw meaningful conclusions about the general relationship between constitutional features and ENGOs, the comparison will have to be extended to other countries. This is the goal of a future version of this paper.

Explaining ENGOs

What constitutional features are relevant for the shaping of ENGOs? There is an enormous literature addressing the wide range of questions that the word “shape” might imply. Groups such as these have been studied by the social movement, the political opportunity structure (POS), and the resource mobilization (RM) literatures. These literatures examine movements and their organizational expressions from a variety of different angles and with a variety of research questions in mind: how do social movements transform into permanent organizations? Do movement organizations act differently than other interest groups? What accounts for their different rates of success? In the process, a wide range of variables have been drawn upon to explain the development of organizations such as the ENGOs: the ideological orientation of the groups, the age of the organizations, the resources available to them, the openness of the political system they confront, the alliance structures of movement groups. Both the number of case studies and the number of potentially relevant variables have grown steadily and these often generate contradictory expectations. (Dalton: article)

Eisenger introduced the concept of the political opportunity structure in 1973 (Kriesi 2004). Since then, there have been studies of the relationship between political structures and social movements and their organizational expression, and scholars have examined the implications of “closed” and “open” systems (Kitschelt 1986), a characteristic that Dryzek et al. (2003) have recently picked up, characterizing the US and Norway as open (although the US is passively and Norway actively so). The POS approach has been theoretically fruitful but has not proved particularly useful in predicting to the features or success of social movements. It has run aground on the problems of the number of variables involved and the question as to what is a fundamental or superficial feature (Rootes 1999).

This paper has a modest goal. It begins with the standard comparative politics literature on corporatism and pluralism and asks whether this is useful in understanding the landscape of the ENGO community. This literature is explicitly meant to describe the general pattern of the relationship between interests groups and formal governmental structures. By “landscape” I mean the structure of the ENGO community. While it is tempting to take on such issues as the way these groups behave, their repertoires of action, the use of symbols and language and their success in achieving their goals – standard questions within much of social movement, new social movement, and resource mobilization literature – these are not addressed here.

The question of landscape is a simple one: do pluralist systems general ENGO communities that look somewhat like that of the more traditional “interest groups” within a given country? Do pluralist systems have a pluralist-looking ENGO community? Do corporatist systems have a corporatist-looking ENGO community? Do, then, these basic concepts in comparative politics literature remain useful in understanding advocacy groups such as ENGOs?

Constitutions

Democracies are a remarkably diverse lot. They solve the problems of representation and efficiency in different ways, and no two democracies are alike. As different solutions reflect distinctive political, cultural, historical and ethnic heritages, they in turn perpetuate them. Democratic political systems distribute power in distinctive ways. These factors shape how civil society relates to the formal structures of government: how one effects change, where one applies pressure, what means and methods are considered acceptable. Typologies of democratic governments focus on the formal structures of government.

Lijphart’s (1999) classificatory scheme has been much used and is very illustrative: he draws upon 10 elements, which he groups into two main dimensions, distinguishing a “Westminster model” or “majoritarian” model from a “consensual” one. Lijphart’s (1999:3-4) 10 elements are: 1) the concentration of executive power, 2) executive-legislative relationships; 3) two-party versus multi-party systems, 4) majoritarian and disproportional systems versus proportional systems; 5) pluralist versus corporatist interest group systems, 6). unitary versus federal government, 7) unicameral vs. bicameral legislatures, 8) flexible versus rigid constitutions, 9) existence of a judicial review procedure independent of the legislature, 10) the presence of an independent central bank. Given so many different elements with potentially differing impacts on a social movement and its organizations, what their combined impact would be in any single case is difficult to predict.

In Lijphart’s scheme, the corporatist-pluralist element is not understood as generated by the others, but as a separate element in its own right. At the same time, these ten features tend to generate two basic clusters: the Majoritarian and the consensual democracies. The Majoritarian model is pluralist and the consensual model is corporatist. The corporatist-pluralist character of industrialized democracies may be a clue to the structure of the ENGO community as well. Any interest group should be impacted by the distribution of power of the political system—that is, many of the other elements of Lijphart’s scheme -- in which they are found. Features such as the concentration of executive power, the executive-legislature relationship, the party system, the unitary or federal structure of the central government, the structure of the national legislature, and judicial review all have to do with how power is distributed throughout governing institutions.

ENGOs are not the same sort of classic interest groups that are traditionally included in corporatist systems, such as labor unions and employers associations, and so will be subject to distinctive shaping forces. (The distinction may be less meaningful in the pluralist system in which such traditional organizations do not have a special relationship with the formal governing institutions). Even so, they are likely to be shaped by many of the same environmental forces that impact interest groups. The organization of the country’s interest group system as a whole then may be a useful indicator for the impact of various combinations of these features as well as others Lijphart overlooks. And so this paper compares the structure of the NGO community with that the structure of the interest group community. By using this approach, the pluralism-corporatism ranking of individual countries provides a standard against which to measure the ENGO community.

Numerous studies rank countries along the corporatist-pluralist dimensions, and the United States and Norway are commonly placed at nearly opposite ends of the spectrum. The United States is universally characterized as pluralistic (Dryzek 2003; Lijphart.1999; Scruggs 1999). Norway is frequently ranked as one of the most corporatist of European states (Dryzek 2003; Lijphart.1999; Siaroff 1999). Dryzek et al. (2003: 22) note that “Norway is normally classified as among the strongest of corporatist systems” and that “among developed countries, Norway is the most institutionally integrative of all kinds of organized interests, not just business.” As late as 1999, Siaroff ranked Norway as among the three considered to be “strongly corporatist”; the USA was “not at all corporatist, but rather pluralist.” Lijphart (.1999) again lists the US and Norway as being nearly polar opposites; relying upon Siaroff’s data for interest group pluralism in which Norway scores as the least pluralist and the US is ranked forth most pluralist (after Canada, Greece and the UK) (Lijphart 1999, 177).

This approach is hardly without problems. The literature warns that the corporatism-pluralism dimension may be too coarse a distinction to be useful. This becomes evident in the case studies that focus on the ways in which interest and advocacy groups work within any given country. At a high level of abstraction, the United States is held to be pluralist, and Norway is usually characterized as relatively corporatist. “Pluralist” and “corporatist” are also normative ideals, expressions of what the relationship between state, civil society, and the market should be (Kjellberg nd.).

But the clear distinction among these fades upon close examination. The existence of, once, iron triangles, and now policy communities as descriptions of how these systems actually work has blurred the neat distinctions among them. In addition, even the features that once placed Norway with little debate in the corporatist camp are fading. The recent national evaluation of the state of Norway’s political system characterized Norway as most prominently a fragmented state rather than possessing the coherence usually suggested by the corporatist label.

To complicate matters, while international experts happily classify Norway as corporatist, a recent Norwegian study (Makt- og demokratiutredningen, Evaluation of Power and Democracy, conducted between 1997 and 2003) concluded that the 1990s witnessed a fundamental breakdown (“grunnleggende brudd”) of the traditional form of organizational life in Norway. While some features remain, organizational life has become competitively organized, less segmented, and links between organizations and the state less dominant (Østerud 2003). This need not mean that the Norwegian system is now indistinguishable from a pluralist system, however. Norwegian Trond Nordby recently described the Norwegian system as “mixed”, retaining significant corporatist features in the negotiations for salaries and subsidies such as in the area of agriculture and fisheries, and in “management”, that is, in the formation and operation of commissions to determine policy (Nordby 1999).

Corporatism and Pluralism

Corporatism and pluralism are different ways in which civil society and the state interact. Descriptions of these include descriptions both of the structure and shape of the interest group community on the one hand and the behavior and functions of those groups on the other. This paper looks exclusively at the structure and shape of the interest groups community, what I am here calling the “landscape.” For reasons, of data and time, only a few of the possible contours of this landscape are examined here: the number and size of ENGOs, their resources and funding, the cooperation and competition among them and their ideological spread.

Pluralist systems are characterized by a large number of interest groups that tend to compete against each other. This structure I assume here is the combined product of many features of the country, many of which may easily pull in different directions. Because these groups enjoy no special relationship with the state, and they have thereby no source of structural power that such a relationship would bring. In this situation, lobbying from outside the state would seem to be a key feature of these groups. This in turn implies that they rely upon a large membership to give them gravitas, and that they need many resources – members and other material resources such as money, expertise, and information – to make an impact. They are less able to turn to structural power of the kind Rokkan refers to in the famous “numbers count but resources decide”. Instead, their numbers are their resources. In addition, as counterweights to the state, they need to distance themselves somewhat from the state, with separate sources of income and their own expertise.