Last year, Slovakia overturned controversial new reporting and disclosure requirements for non-governmental organisations. The country's subsequent turn to administrative scrutiny illustrates a broader problem. Drawing on new survey experiments in Slovakia, Hungary and Türkiye, Ilker Kalin shows that targeting 'foreign-funded' organisations does little to legitimise restrictions. Yet quieter administrative pressure may be harder to recognise and resist
Recent events in Slovakia offer revealing evidence of how pressure on civil society can change form.
In April 2025, the country's parliament adopted controversial new reporting and disclosure requirements for non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Earlier proposals had gone further, envisaging a special category for organisations receiving foreign support and later treating some NGOs as lobbyists. Those provisions were dropped before the law was passed, but substantial administrative requirements remained.
In December, Slovakia’s Constitutional Court declared the legislation unconstitutional, and the contested provisions ceased to apply after the judgment was published in February 2026.
Two weeks later, however, the government announced a large-scale audit of NGO functioning and financing. State authorities were instructed to intensify controls using existing powers, covering public funding, procurement, labour law, data protection and other areas.
Slovakia’s controversial NGO law was bypassed, but the pressure on civil society was not.
Governments seeking to constrain civil society do not always shut down organisations or ban their activities. They can instead make them harder to operate through registration requirements, reporting rules, funding restrictions, inspections and penalties.
Political scientist Suparna Chaudhry calls this an administrative crackdown: the use of legal restrictions to create barriers to NGOs’ entry, funding, and advocacy.
Foreign funding has become a particularly prominent target in many countries facing democratic backsliding. Russia’s 2012 'foreign agent' law became perhaps the best-known contemporary example, requiring organisations receiving foreign funding and engaging in vaguely defined 'political activity' to register as foreign agents. Similar restrictions and foreign-influence narratives have since appeared elsewhere.
In Hungary, for example, a 2025 bill proposed allowing the Sovereignty Protection Office to blacklist foreign-funded civil-society and media organisations deemed threats to national sovereignty and subject them to extensive financial scrutiny and restrictions.
In countries facing democratic backsliding, groups working on contentious issues, such as human rights, may struggle to raise funds domestically. This makes foreign funding particularly important to their survival
There is a political logic to this focus. Civil-society organisations can mobilise citizens, document abuses, and transmit information to international advocacy networks. Groups working on contentious issues, such as human rights and democracy, may also struggle to raise funds domestically, making foreign funding particularly important to their survival.
Governments often target civil society by portraying such financial ties as evidence of outside influence, using narratives of sovereignty, transparency or national security to justify restrictions.
But do government rhetoric and selective targeting actually make restrictions more acceptable to citizens?
Between January and June 2026, I fielded survey experiments with roughly 5,200 respondents across Türkiye, Hungary and Slovakia.
Participants read a short news story about their government introducing new regulations on civil-society organisations. The measures included funding disclosure, restrictions on public activities and penalties for non-compliance.
The experiment varied two things randomly, applying regulations either to all civil-society organisations or only to foreign-funded ones. The government justified these regulations through transparency or national security.
Across all three countries, narrowing the restrictions to foreign-funded organisations produced no significant increase in support for, and no significant reduction in, perceived repression.
Nor did national-security rhetoric make the measures more acceptable. If anything, attitudes tended to move in the opposite direction: towards greater perceptions of repression and lower support for it.
In other words, neither selective targeting nor security rhetoric made the restrictions appear more acceptable.
That sounds reassuring, but it is only part of the story.
The absence of strong legitimation effects does not mean selective repression is fully politically ineffective. It may still gain political cover in other ways.
In Türkiye, for example, respondents found the regulations applied only to foreign-funded organisations to be less likely to affect the freedoms of ordinary citizens. They did not, however, regard the restrictions themselves as less repressive.
A citizen can therefore recognise something as repression while simultaneously believing it is somebody else’s problem.
This finding appeared only in Türkiye, so we shouldn't generalise it too far. But it points to an important possibility: the political effect of selective targeting may be less about manufacturing consent to repression than about manufacturing distance from its consequences. In other words, if citizens see such measures as being confined to a narrow group, recognising them as repressive does not necessarily mean seeing their own freedoms as being at stake.
If citizens see restrictions as confined to a narrow group, recognising them as repressive does not necessarily mean seeing their own freedoms as being at stake
Political loyalties create another obstacle. Citizens often interpret government actions through prior attachments and policy preferences.
My data reveals a related pattern data. Across the three countries, higher trust in government was strongly associated with perceiving the same restrictions as less repressive and expressing greater support for them.
Citizens, in other words, do not encounter restrictions on civil society as blank slates. Their existing political attachments and trust in those who govern shape how they interpret the same policy.
This is what makes Slovakia’s current administrative turn important.
An audit, procurement check or data-protection investigation can, of course, be entirely legitimate. Governments have a responsibility to ensure that organisations comply with the law.
The important question is whether such powers are applied neutrally and proportionately, or selectively as instruments of political pressure.
Substantive 'foreign-agent' laws give opponents something concrete to challenge. They have a framework and are subject to parliamentary votes. Courts can review them. Protesters can organise against them.
Administrative pressure is more subtle than 'foreign-agent' laws, but each individual inspection can become a cumulative burden on civil society
Administrative pressure is, however, more subtle. Governments can defend each inspection individually as routine enforcement, even when the cumulative burden on civil society becomes substantial.
Recent events in Slovakia therefore point to a wider challenge for democracies experiencing backsliding. Governments may not need to persuade citizens that repression is legitimate. Selective targeting can make restrictions seem distant, political loyalties can shape how citizens interpret them, and administrative tools can obscure their political character altogether.
The harder question, in Slovakia and beyond, is how to recognise political pressure when it takes the form of ordinary ‘paperwork’.
This research was funded by NextGenerationEU through the Recovery and Resilience Plan for Slovakia, project No. 09I03-03-V04-00609
