Show me how to live: transactional advocacy organizations, managerial populism, and the EU

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses the perceived influence of managerial populism on transactional advocacy organizations (TAOs) in the Czech Republic and the transformation of their strategies outside the national political process. It aims at two goals: First, in contrast to the prevailing narratives of populism as universally worsening the conditions for civil society actors, we demonstrate that there is not a uniform impact from populist governance on advocacy organizations and that we need to differentiate between TAOs and other advocacy organizations. Second, the paper analyses the transformation of TAO strategies after the rise of populist governance with a focus on the transnational dimension of their goals, alliances, and resources. We show whether and to what extent TAOs compensate for change in their environment through reconnecting to European political processes. The paper builds on organizational surveys of Czech advocacy organizations, most notably the Czech Comparative Interest Group survey carried out in 2019–2020.

KEYWORDS:

• Czech Republic
• civil society
• externalization
• managerial populism
• EU

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In 2019, Babiš and his Ministry of Finance also backed out of canceling prepayments for public benefit projects funded from the EU, which were typically implemented by nonprofit organizations. Furthermore, the share of national public funding in the budget of advocacy organizations in the panel study (2006–2020; see Data and Methods) did not deteriorate dramatically: for most organizations, it remained the same (20%) or increased (50%).

2. In some cases, the division went across a particular sector: e.g. Greenpeace was identified as TAO, while the Czech Union for Nature Conservation as non-TAO.

Additional information

Funding

Work on this article was supported by the Czech Science Foundation (project “Between revolution and crisis: Emergence, evolution, and re-structuring of economic protest in post-socialist context,” reg. no. 23-07114S) and by Cooperatio Program, research area Sociology and Applied Social Sciences at Charles University.