Wesley Longhofer

The last two decades have witnessed an unprecedented rise in government restrictions on foreign funding to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Often in the name of defending the nation from outside influences, over 60 countries have implemented laws limiting foreign funding to NGOs. We use event history analyses to evaluate domestic and global explanations for the adoption of these policies over the period 1994–2015. Prior work has argued that funding restrictions result from real or perceived threats to political regimes, especially in countries with competitive elections. We add to this story by situating it in a larger global and cultural context: new funding laws are part of a growing backlash against the liberal international order, which has long sponsored international and domestic NGOs devoted to issues such as human rights and the environment. In an era of increasing resistance toward globally linked civil society groups—the primary carriers of liberal world society—NGO funding restrictions are now diffusing widely across the international system. We argue that restriction policies will be most common among countries that are linked to illiberal or anti-Western organizations and discourses in the international community. Moreover, adoption will accelerate as more countries do it, representing a growing “wave” or backlash against the liberal international order. Findings support the prior literature as well as our new arguments regarding illiberal international organizations and global backlash.

We examine changes in the effectiveness of local civic action in relation to changes over time in racial diversity and income inequality. Local civic action comprises situations in which community members come together—typically with support from local organizations—to address common issues. The collective orientation of local civic action makes it sensitive to changes in local social conditions. As these changes unfold, local organizations become differentially able to support civic action. Here, our core argument features the process through which community members associate with different local organizations and how mandated versus voluntary association results in distinct responses to increased social and economic heterogeneity. We test this argument using three decades of data describing local campaigns of the annual Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF program. A baseline model shows that within-county increases in racial diversity and income inequality are associated with diminished campaign effectiveness. Subsequent models that separate out campaigns organized by schools, churches, and clubs show that schools are relatively more effective mobilizers as racial diversity and income inequality increase, arguably due to the greater demographic matching that is induced by mandated school participation.

World society scholars have focused on how international organizations lead nation-states to adopt similar policies, procedures, and programs in order to signal compliance to prevailing rules and norms. In this study, the authors propose that integration into world society is associated with higher levels of legal formalism, which in turn can result in lengthening the execution of legal procedures. The empirical analysis of the study combines a dataset of country-level membership in international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) with a dataset on legal formalism and procedural duration assembled by the Lex Mundi Project. The data cover an unusually large set of countries for an extensive period. The analyses consider two typical settings for everyday contract disputes—check cashing and tenant eviction—and find evidence consistent with the authors’ claims.

Since 1980, the number of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in developing countries has exploded. Published research on NGOs has paralleled this growth, yet there exists scant synthesis of the literature. This article presents a synthesis, while also introducing a collaborative research platform, the NGO Knowledge Collective. We ask four questions: first, who studies NGOs, and how do they study them? Second, what issues, sectors and places are studied when NGOs are the focus? Third, what effect do NGO activities have on specific development outcomes? And fourth, what path should the NGO research agenda take? To answer these questions, we conduct a mixed-method systematic review of social science publications on NGOs, which includes computer-assisted content analysis of 3336 English-language journal articles (1980–2014), alongside a close, qualitative analysis of 300 randomly selected articles. We find, first, that interdisciplinary journals dominate NGO publishing, that research on NGOs is more qualitative than quantitative, and that practitioners publish, but Northern academics create most published knowledge. Second, we find the literature is framed around six overarching questions regarding: the nature of NGOs; their emergence and development; how they conduct their work; their impacts; how they relate to other actors; and how they contribute to the (re)production of cultural dynamics. Articles also focus disproportionately on the most populated and/or politically salient countries, and on the governance and health sectors. Third, we find that scholars generally report favorable effects of NGOs on health and governance outcomes. Fourth, we propose a research agenda calling for scholars to: address neglected sectors, geographies, and contextual conditions; increase author representativeness; improve research designs to include counterfactuals or comparison groups; and better share data and findings, including results from additional, focused NGO-related systematic reviews. Implementing this agenda will help reduce bias in decisions by donors, governments, and other development actors, which should improve development outcomes.

Climate change is arguably the greatest threat to society as power plants, the single largest human source of heat-trapping pollution, continue to emit massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. Sociologists have identified several possible structural determinants of electricity-based CO2 emissions, including international trade and global normative regimes, national political–legal systems, and organizational size and age. But because they treat these factors as competing predictors, scholars have yet to examine how they might work together to explain why some power plants emit vastly more pollutants than others. Using a worldwide data set of utility facilities and fuzzy-set methods, we analyze the conjoint effects of global, political, and organizational conditions on fossil-fueled plants’ CO2 emissions. Findings reveal that hyperpolluters’ emission rates are a function of four distinct causal recipes, which we label coercive, quiescent, expropriative, and inertial configurations, and these same sets of conditions also increase plants’ emission levels.

Will power plants emit less or more CO2 in anticipation of stronger climate policies that would strand fossil fuel reserves? Here, using a worldwide data source on individual power plants’ CO2 emissions and the value of countries’ at-risk fossil fuel assets, we show that between 2009 and 2018, plants emitted more CO2 in countries where more assets would be devalued under a 1.5 °C scenario, which we theorize is due to these countries’ regulatory leniency and plants’ vested interest in long-term fossil fuel contracts. Although the extra amount of carbon emitted each year trigged by imperiled assets is relatively small, it would exhaust a sizable portion of the electricity sector’s remaining carbon budget when added up over time. This is especially true in the U.S. and Russia where up to 16% and 12% of their budgets, respectively, could be spent within ten years due solely to the stranded asset effect.