Restrictive laws targeting nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have proliferated globally. The central claim is that governments learn to restrict NGOs primarily by copying regional legislative examples, not by reacting to NGO growth or to domestic nonarmed bottom-up threats.

🔍 Two Competing Learning Paths

• Learning from threats: States adopt NGO restrictions in response to nonarmed bottom-up threats in their regional environment.
• Learning from examples: States imitate the legislative behavior of other states in their region and adopt similar NGO restrictions.

📊 What was analyzed and how

• An original panel dataset on NGO restrictions covering 96 countries across 1992–2016.
• Statistical tests use negative binomial regression and survival analyses to model the timing and count of restrictions.
• Spatially weighted techniques account for regional influence and cross-border policy contagion.

🧾 Key findings

• Very limited empirical support for learning from threats: nonarmed bottom-up threats in the region do not consistently predict adoption of NGO restrictions.
• Consistent and robust evidence for learning from examples: regional imitation strongly predicts the spread of restrictive NGO laws.
• Textual corroboration: close comparisons of laws in the Middle East and Africa reveal legal provisions copied nearly verbatim from one national law into another, reinforcing the statistical evidence of imitation.

⚖️ Why it matters

• The diffusion of restrictive NGO laws through imitation poses distinct risks to democratic quality and civil society resilience.
• The pattern supports concerns about a transition toward a postliberal order driven by policy emulation rather than by domestic insecurity.
• Findings offer actionable insight for policymakers, lawyers, and civil-society practitioners seeking to counter coordinated legal restrictions on NGOs.