Keywords

Introduction

Conditions for civil society actors have changed markedly in recent decades in most countries in Europe and beyond. After a period of rapid growth in both scale and scope during the 1990s, accompanied by growing political expectations, resources, and capacity, the environment for civil society organisations (CSOs) has become more complex and challenging since the turn of the millennium (Anheier, 2017; Poppe & Wolff, 2017).

These changing conditions are the subject of an emerging literature on the ‘shrinking space’ for civil society. Researchers have shown that in many countries, governments now use legal and administrative means to diminish the influence of CSOs, and they often try to delegitimise them (Chaudhry, 2022; Glasius et al., 2020; della Porta & Steinhilper, 2021). A parallel trend affecting civil society is marketisation, which has led to new demands and tougher competition for resources among CSOs (Harris, 2018; Maier et al., 2016). While these macro trends indicate that the role of civil society is now questioned in more ways than one, so far few have studied how its key representatives experience these challenges.

In this chapter, we turn to the civil society leaders themselves. That is, instead of investigating macro-level developments, as most of the literature does, we focus on how the current situation for civil society is experienced by some of its key leaders—with the ambition to contribute to a more multifaceted understanding of the trends mentioned above. The leaders of resource-rich CSOs are the target of much of today’s questioning of civil society. They operate in a sector that is sensitive to social, economic, and political challenges, where they must respond to and navigate the various drivers of change (Hodges & Howieson, 2017). It is therefore important to understand how these ‘civil society elites’ (see Chap. 1 in this volume) experience contemporary developments and challenges. Here, we want to find out about their experiences of being contested, specifically what the points of critique concern, from where they originate, and how thoroughgoing they are.

We have two interrelated research aims. One is empirical, to map experiences of contestation among civil society elites in four different European countries with a view to trace similarities and differences among the countries. To our knowledge, no such study has been conducted. We want to examine both challenges directed at civil society elites in their capacity as leaders and the challenges directed at the organisations that these elites represent. In order to fulfil our empirical aim, our other ambition is to create an analytical framework for studying instances of civil society elite contestation because we have not been able to find one that is readily available. As will be detailed below, we will distinguish between the target of contestation, the source of contestation, and the depth or degree of contestation.

The data that we use have been generated by a large survey conducted with civil society elites in Italy, Poland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom (UK) (see Appendix in this volume). As we will explain below, these countries represent different civil society regimes and have distinct political histories and cultures with regard to civil society.

The outline of our chapter is as follows. First, we describe the current macro-level civil society processes (shrinking civic space and marketisation) in some detail. We then move on to briefly present the different national contexts. Next, we introduce the analytical framework, followed by a brief methods section. We then present the findings of our empirical study. In the concluding section, we discuss the main results and possible avenues for future research.

Current Macro-Level Trends Affecting Civil Society

Shrinking Space for Civil Society

In the last 10–15 years, civil society has been hit by intensified ideological resistance from outside actors. From having been accepted and even celebrated political actors at both the national and international levels, leading CSOs are now often the targets of different forms of contestation (Chaudhry, 2022; Ruzza & Sanchez Salgado, 2021). CSOs in countries around the globe are accused of not representing the will of the people and are experiencing a shrinking civil space (Bill, 2020; van der Borgh & Terwindt, 2012; Howell et al., 2008; Toepler et al., 2020). Some of the CSOs’ leaders experience threats and harassments, particularly those who are young, female, or foreign-born and those who are active in gender policy areas (Scaramuzzino & Scaramuzzino, 2021). Moreover, many governments have taken steps to limit external resources and support for CSOs, dismissing such aid as foreign political interference (Carothers, 2016). This is mainly done through legal measures to restrict or ban foreign financing of domestic CSOs (Rutzen, 2015). Such campaigns can be understood as part of a broader trend of attacks on independent civil society and the contraction of political space for activism (CIVICUS, 2016; Poppe & Wolff, 2017).

Glasius et al. (2020) investigated the situation in 96 countries in different world regions in 1992–2016. The researchers found that restrictions against CSOs began to rise in 1997 and have continued to grow since then. In autocracies and hybrid regimes, restrictions have increased fourfold. In democracies, restrictions have also increased, but more modestly. They see this development of restrictive and repressive measures as an ‘illiberal norm cascade’ as states learn from each other’s practices and over time come to regard it as legitimate to restrict the activities of CSOs (Ibid: 466).

CIVICUS, a global alliance of CSOs, monitors the space for civil society and each year classifies countries’ civic spaces. Among the four countries that we compare, Sweden is the only ‘open’ one. In Italy and the UK, civic space is ‘narrowed’, which means that while ‘the state allows CSOs to exercise their rights to freedom of association, peaceful assembly and expression, violations of these rights also take place’. In Poland, civic space is classified as ‘obstructed’, meaning that it ‘is heavily contested by power holders, who impose a combination of legal and practical constraints on the full enjoyment of fundamental rights’ (CIVICUS Monitor, 2022).

The loudest attacks on liberal civil society are mobilised by right-wing populists who have gained ground in a number of countries in Eastern Europe and elsewhere (Brechenmacher & Carothers, 2018; Graff & Korolczuk, 2021; Kravchenko et al., 2022; Ploszka, 2020). Such attacks do not, however, affect all CSOs to the same extent (Roggeband & Krizsán, 2021). According to Suparna Chaudhry, ‘[s]tates would not be repressing NGOs if these groups were not successful in spreading democratic norms by challenging electoral irregularities, corruption, and a lack of rule of law and respect for human rights’ (Chaudhry, 2022: 36). While such CSOs are increasingly silenced, other parts of civil society may instead experience an expanding space, for instance, the more apolitical actors whose services are needed to deliver welfare services and the CSOs that voluntarily align with illiberal regimes for religious or nationalistic reasons, providing a hotbed for ‘uncivil’ society (Toepler et al., 2020). Some scholars therefore now talk about a ‘shifting’ or ‘changing’ space for civil society rather than just a shrinking space (Anheier et al., 2019; Toepler et al., 2020).

Marketisation, Professionalisation, and New Roles for Civil Society

Conditions for CSOs have also changed in other ways. The economic crisis in 2008 contributed to austerity measures, reduced resources, and increased competition for financial resources among CSOs.

The waves of privatisation and the introduction of new public management principles in many countries has led to tougher competition for resources and new demands and expectations on CSOs (Hvenmark, 2013; McMullen, 2020; Maier et al., 2016). The roles of CSOs have become more complex as they are expected to fulfil different, sometimes contradictory, roles. In addition to increased expectations that they will contribute to welfare service delivery, they are expected to partner up in solving societal challenges through partnership arrangements (Aiken & Bode, 2009). Such partnerships are often justified by CSOs’ contributions to democratic and civic renewal, but they have also raised concerns about governmental co-optation and a de-radicalisation of the sector (Eikenberry & Kluver, 2004; Howell et al., 2008).

In some countries, the civil society sector has developed into its own labour market, with internal career opportunities and specialised services and positions. Concepts such as ‘professionalisation’, ‘bureaucratisation’, and ‘NGOisation’ capture current trends towards widening distances between CSO leaders and their members and between major CSOs and grassroots organisations (Eagleton-Pierce, 2018; Hwang & Powell, 2009; Kreutzer & Jäger, 2011; see also Heylen et al., 2020).

Four Civil Society Contexts

While most of the challenges mentioned so far are present across Europe (and beyond), the political and cultural context in which national civil society is embedded influences how these tendencies and debates are played out and what consequences they have. Countries have different types of ‘civil society regimes’ that are distinguished, among other things, on the basis of the kind of welfare state they are part of and differences with regard to the role of CSOs in service production and advocacy (Anheier & Salamon, 2006).

The liberal civil society regime, represented by the UK, is characterised by a strong tradition of charity, low government spending, and a large civil society sector. The sector has a service-provision orientation and is dominated by large charitable organisations with professionalised management boards (Maclean et al., 2021) that have significantly greater access to political and economic resources compared to other civil society actors. Today, many CSOs in the UK are struggling with the impact of shrinking government funding and sharply increased competition for these funds. UK CSOs are also subject to tighter regulation along with pressure to adopt more formal organisational structures and more business-like management systems (Harris, 2018).

Sweden represents the social democratic civil society regime type, traditionally characterised by broad popular movements in collaborative arrangements with the state. Service provision is mainly provided by the state while CSOs have traditionally fulfilled expressive and advocacy functions, including a watchdog task in relation to public policy (Lundström & Wijkström, 1997; Meeuwisse & Scaramuzzino, 2017; Mota & Mourao, 2014). However, Swedish civil society is increasingly professionalised and is engaged in service provision to a greater extent than before—and this has been described as a shift ‘from voice to service’ (Kings, 2022; Lundström & Wijkström, 2012). This is partly an effect of the privatisation and deregulation of care services that has taken place in Sweden (Feltenius & Wide, 2019; Petersen & Hjelmar, 2014), which has also intensified competition between CSOs and between for-profit and non-profit organisations.

Italy is usually considered a corporatist civil society regime type, distinguished by many welfare services carried out by CSOs through collaborative agreements and contracts with the state. Many CSOs combine advocacy with social services (Borzaga, 2004), and the civil society sector has a pillarised structure marked by ideological affiliation at the local and national levels (Bassoli, 2017; Santilli & Scaramuzzino, 2021). The sector is shaped by CSOs belonging to either one or the other of two main cultural and political groups, or pillars, namely the Catholic group and the post-communist secular group. The political climate has heated up in recent years as populist parties have gained more influence in government, and some CSOs have been subjected to delegitimisation campaigns. Italian civil society has also been affected by a national reform in which only a few meta-organisations are to represent the entire civil society sector.

Like in Italy, Poland’s civil society is polarised in ideological terms with the Catholic church playing a significant role in this battlefield. The country has a recent past of a repressive political system and is considered to be marked by low levels of civic participation as well as dependence on public funding. It is therefore generally regarded as a statist or post-communist civil society regime type (Cinalli & Giugni, 2014). However, the number of CSOs increased rapidly after 1989, as did more informal forms of activism (Jacobsson & Korolczuk, 2017). Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, a polarisation between conservative and liberal civil society has gradually intensified (McGee, 2020). When the populist Law and Justice Party (PiS) came to power in 2015, it developed strategies to replace the so-called liberal ‘establishment elite’, allegedly representing foreign interests, by what was called the ‘counter-elite’ who are committed to the promotion of national interests (Bill, 2020; Korolczuk, 2022 and Korolczuk in this volume). The new government’s policies and the shrinking civic space have been met with a series of large-scale demonstrations.

Analytical Framework: Three Dimensions of Civil Society Contestation

The objective of this section is to elaborate a model for analysing civil society elites’ experiences of contestation in civil society. We have identified three main dimensions to this question, which we refer to as the target, the source, and the depth of contestation.

The target of contestation concerns, quite simply, who is on the receiving end of the critique. In the literature on social movements, CSOs are approached as being engaged in ‘contentious politics’ targeting governments and other power holders (Tilly & Tarrow, 2015). But here they find themselves at the receiving end of critique—themselves being the targets. We distinguish between challenges directed at individual leaders, and the challenges aimed at the organisations that they represent.

The source of contestation concerns from where the contestation is articulated. There are three main categories of contestation sources that seem relevant in our case. The contestation may be internal and directed from people within the same organisation. It may also be sectorial, that is, directed from people and organisations outside one’s own organisation but inside the civil society sector. Finally, contestation may be external to the sector, as is the case with critique directed by the media, by the government, by politicians, and so on.

The depth of contestation has to do with how thoroughgoing the contestation is. The legitimacy of civil society rests on a great number of grounds (Matelski et al., 2021), and CSOs and their leaders can be accused on just as many grounds for failing to live up to expectations. For analytical purposes we differentiate between three different levels of contestation—drawing inspiration from Robert A. Dahl who distinguished between different types of political opposition in a similar fashion (Dahl, 1966: 341–344; cf. Kalm & Uhlin, 2015: 48–49). What we refer to as minor degree of contestation has to do with competition over resources or positions, disappointments with leadership, etc. Such struggles can be tough indeed, especially if resources are limited, and the word ‘minor’ is not meant to trivialise but to indicate the type of contestation that is more or less part of the normal operation of civil society. A medium degree of contestation refers to deeper-going dissatisfactions that nevertheless do not amount to wholesale delegitimation of the leadership or the CSO. Examples may include disagreements over policy positions or accusations of the leadership for deficient representativeness or tenuous bonds with their constituency. Major contestation, finally, refers to ideological delegitimation and wholesale rejection of an organisation, or even of civil society as a whole.

Method and Data

We examined the experiences of leaders of resource-rich CSOs operating in different social and political national contexts. The data were collected through a cross-country survey (‘The Civil Society Elite Survey’) with leaders of prominent CSOs, as defined by elite scores (see the Appendix in this volume). The leaders who responded to the survey were from Italy (N = 133), Poland (N = 175), Sweden (N = 308), and the UK (N = 123). While the leaders all represented organisations of some significance, these were diverse in terms of issue areas, missions, constituencies, and relations with public authorities and other stakeholders.

For our analysis, we focused on the answers to a set of closed and open-ended survey questions about the leaders’ experiences of contestations of their leadership position and of contestations directed at the organisation. For the questions with fixed response options, it was possible to enter more than one answer and to provide additional or alternative answers. The questions are presented below:

  1. 1.

    Have you ever experienced that your position as a leader in the organisation was questioned? (Yes/No)

  2. 2.

    If yes, who questioned your position?(four response options)

  3. 3.

    In your view, on what grounds was your position challenged?(six response options)

  4. 4.

    Are there organisations, institutions, or groups that challenge the position of your organisation in civil society? (Yes/No)

  5. 5.

    If yes, could you specify which? (open-ended question)

  6. 6.

    On what grounds is your organisation challenged? (five response options)

We coded the data using our analytical framework in which experiences are examined in terms of the target, the source, and the depth of contestations, and we also paid attention to whether experiences differed across countries. In the following, we report on our main findings and begin with contestations directed at the leaders of resource-rich CSOs.

Challenges Aimed at Civil Society Elites in Their Capacity as Leaders

One of the dimensions of our model for analysing experiences of contestations among civil society elites concerns the target of contestation, that is, to whom the criticism is directed. The majority of our respondents answered that they had never experienced that their position as a leader in the organisation was questioned. However, slightly more than 40% of the leaders in Italy and Sweden and just over a third in the UK answered that they had such experiences (Cramer’s V = 0.181). Among the Polish leaders, only one-fifth agreed with that statement.

Is it a high figure if up to 40% of the civil society elites in three out of four countries have experienced questioning of their position as a leader? Does this indicate a shrinking civil space and/or lack of legitimacy? Reasonably, the answers depend on the type of objections directed at the leaders and if they come from within the leaders’ organisations or from the outside. The answers to the follow-up questions contributed with some clarifications.

Mainly Internal Opponents and Contestations at a Minor Level

The response options to the question concerning the sources of contestation were based on the premise that it makes a difference whether the criticism is internal (stemming from within the same organisation), sectorial (from elsewhere within the civil society sector), or external (from outside actors). The literature on shrinking civil space focuses mainly on outside actors such as governments, public authorities, and news media (see, e.g., Ploszka, 2020; Toepler et al., 2020), while we wanted to capture a wider range of potential challengers.

As shown in Table 11.1, the civil society elites in all of the surveyed countries perceived themselves to be questioned primarily by people from within their own organisation (categories mentioned were individual employees, office staff, union representatives, board members, and the founders). However, the UK leaders stood out from the others by more often claiming to also be questioned by other CSOs, news media, and representatives of public organisations.

Table 11.1 Sources of contestation of leadership positions. Answers are in percentages among civil society elites in the four countries (N = 264)
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The question concerning the grounds on which the leadership position was challenged is related to the depth of contestation. The response options available to the survey respondents were based on previous research on the reasons for questioning the legitimacy of civil society leaders, which in Table 11.2 are categorised in accordance with our three levels of contention as minor, medium, or major.

Table 11.2 Grounds for contesting leadership positions (N = 262)
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As can be seen from Table 11.2, the civil society elites in all four countries indicated that they were mainly challenged on grounds that we have described as minor levels of contestation, that is, the type of contestation that can be expected in most organisations and which does not mean that the very basis for the operation is called into question. It is also clear that the leaders more often perceived themselves as challenged because of decisions they had made or their ideas about organisational development than because their expertise was called into question. It can furthermore be noted that leadership style was more often cited as a reason for challenge among Polish and Italian civil society leaders than among the others.

Many of the responses to the open-ended question about possible other reasons for challenging the position of leaders can also be considered minor levels of contestation, for example, competition due to different perceptions of recruitment policies or ‘jealousy’. These answers reflect tensions and value conflicts about recruitment principles within many CSOs today, reinforced by an increased degree of professionalisation. Should the leaders represent the constituencies and be recruited from within the (member) organisation, or should they be recruited in open competition and selected based on their professional skills? These are two different types of leaders based on different sources of legitimacy (Meeuwisse & Scaramuzzino, 2023). Both externally recruited civil society leaders and those who were internally recruited reported that they had been questioned for obtaining their position in the ‘wrong’ way.

The UK leaders claimed more often than the others (especially in comparison to Italian and Polish leaders) that their position had been challenged due to contestation at a medium level, such as discrimination. They were also more likely to say that their leadership position had been challenged because of a lack of representativeness. In the open-ended answers, some of the leaders mentioned ageism or that their position as a leader was challenged by virtue of being ‘an outspoken working-class woman’, while another claimed that it was because ‘I had a leadership style that was more inclusive than the other senior managers’. Issues of discrimination and representativeness (for instance, related to race, gender, or age) are currently the subject of heated debate in the UK, and the civil society sector in several reports has been found to be lacking in these respects (Chapman, 2020; Estwick, 2021; Ivanovska Hadjievska, 2022). Leaders of key CSOs have been accused of being a closed group with a similar background through the #charitysowhite Twitter campaign. The civil society elites in the other national contexts did not (yet) seem to be subject to such scrutiny and criticism, although there may be grounds for this in some countries (e.g. in Italy, see Chap. 3 by Lee and Scaramuzzino in this volume).

Overall, relatively few of the civil society elites in the four national contexts surveyed had experiences of being challenged on ideological grounds, which we categorise as major contestations.

Challenges Aimed at the Organisations that the Elites Represent

More than half of the Swedish respondents (55%) answered yes to the question whether there were organisations, institutions, or groups that challenged the organisation that they represented, while only one fifth of the Polish leaders (Cramer’s V = 0.270) answered yes. In Italy and the UK, about a third of the leaders answered the question in the affirmative. It is important to remember that the survey was aimed at leaders of organisations in civil society who have a strong position (in terms of resources, members, access to policy processes, etc., i.e. those with high elite scores) in their respective countries. From that point of view, it is quite remarkable that such a large proportion of leaders—not least in Sweden—perceived that their organisations were challenged from the outside.

A Mix of Opponents and Contestations at Both Minor and Major Levels

A total of 198 respondents specified who the challengers were, and this testified to both sectorial and external sources of contestation. The type of challengers most often reported by elites in all the countries surveyed were either rival organisations (other CSOs or private organisations) competing for resources, members, or attention, or ideological opponents of various kinds (politicians, social media actors, or CSOs with other values). Government agencies were also mentioned, but it was primarily Polish leaders who singled out the government as the main challenger of their organisations’ position. Nationalist, populist, and right-wing extremist groups of various kinds were the most frequently stated as ideological opponents.

The Swedish leaders testified to fierce sectorial competition for resources and members between CSOs, and to an increasing degree with for-profit actors. Some also stated that the competition had increased because the state subsidy had decreased or was becoming more and more uncertain. Ideological divisions within different movements were also addressed. Furthermore, some representatives of religious organisations stated that they were opposed in Swedish society at large by both secular organisations and by the state and the general public ‘in the form of opposition to everything religious, such as independent religious schools and clerical education’. Some external sources of contestation were also mentioned. Several Swedish leaders of CSOs advocating for rights and justice stated that the position of their organisations was being challenged by right-wing nationalist actors. Some Swedish leaders also reported that their organisations were challenged by government agencies that seized upon CSOs’ issues:

Actors who believe that the issues we work with and for, above all with a focus on women’s rights to participate on equal terms and with the same conditions as men, are not needed today in Sweden, but are better managed by them, such as bureaucracy and administrative authorities who want to steer these issues from the top down without dialogue with knowledgeable civil society actors.

The answers from the UK leaders were similar to those from Sweden, that is, the positions of the CSOs were reportedly challenged by competitors within or outside the civil society sector as well as by ideological opponents. Here, too, religious organisations were said to be opposed by ‘secularists’. One leader claimed that the conflicts were about ‘disagreements on the veracity of climate change, moon landings, and other conspiracy theories’. Some leaders perceived that their organisation was challenged by government agencies that preferred to support those who are less critical: ‘Government sometimes tries to find more benign, less challenging organisations to elicit support.’ Unlike in the Swedish material, one UK leader also mentioned that government officials did not appreciate the role that CSOs play as an umbrella body.

Several of the responses from the Polish leaders reflected experiences of being actively opposed by the government (the Law and Justice [PiS] party). The comments were less about competition for resources and more about ideological conflicts. In addition to controversies on, for example, religious and family-related issues, the answers testified to disagreement over migration and educational issues.

The comments from the Italian leaders were, just as in the other countries, both about competition for resources with CSOs engaged in the same area of activity (e.g. addiction, migration, and international organisations for helping children) and about ideological conflicts. Several of the responses reflected experiences of being actively opposed by far-right populist actors and of being challenged by political parties critical of CSO activities. Civil society umbrella networks were also mentioned by some respondents as challengers, as were local and regional administrations.

The final survey question was about the grounds for challenging the organisations, which was also touched on in the open-ended answers mentioned above. As shown in Table 11.3, we chose to categorise competition for access to political processes as well as competition for status in civil society as cases of a medium degree of contestation because they might involve disagreements over policy positions.

Table 11.3 Grounds for contesting the organisation’s position (N = 289)
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Two types of contestations against the organisations seem to dominate in all four countries. On the one hand, there are ideological differences, which we have categorised as a profound type of conflict (major), and on the other hand there is competition over resources, which we have defined as less wide-ranging (minor). Medium levels of contestation were mentioned less frequently, except in the UK and Poland where over half of the leaders mentioned one or both examples of such grounds.

The respondents from the UK agreed to most statements except ‘personal differences’, suggesting that there are many different kinds of tensions in the British civil society sector. One UK leader mentioned that yet another ground for questioning the organisation was that ‘we are seen as a threat to investments made by wealthy individuals’, while another stated that the organisation was challenged because of ‘our stated position of collaborating rather than competing’. Polish leaders considered ‘ideological differences’ to be as important a cause as those in the UK, but mentioned ‘competition for resources’ to a lesser extent than leaders in the other countries. However, they believed as much as the British respondents that their organisations were challenged due to competition over status within civil society.

Conclusion

We have pursued two aims in this chapter. One was to create an analytical framework with which to study experiences of contestation among civil society elites. Our suggestion is to analytically distinguish between three different dimensions, namely the target, the source, and the depth of contestation. We acknowledge that in other historical and geographical contexts, other dimensions might be relevant. For instance, we did not include the means of contestation, that is, whether or not violence is used, because we did not think it applicable for our particular cases. The other goal was to use the analytical framework that we developed to compare experiences of contestation among civil society elites in four European contexts where CSOs operate under partly different conditions.

An overall result of our study is that many civil society elites in Italy, Poland, Sweden, and the UK had neither experienced that their position as leaders nor their organisations had been challenged. In other words, not all CSOs seem to be affected by the questioning of civil society that the literature describes. This result may have to do with the fact that it is the leaders of the most resource-rich CSOs who were surveyed, and the answers may have been different if the survey had been addressed to leaders of more average-sized CSOs. On the other hand, much of the criticism directed at civil society refers precisely to leaders and organisations that enjoy elite status. Although not the majority, it should however be noted that a non-negligible proportion of the civil society elites who responded had indeed been challenged in their leadership position and that the percentage rose significantly when the question concerned the organisations they represented, particularly among the Swedish respondents. The differences in the response patterns further reflect how macro-level developments such as shrinking civil space and marketisation have impacted civil society in different ways in our four different European contexts.

A common pattern across the countries is that the civil society leaders seem to be mostly challenged by ‘their peers’ as a form of internal contestation. Challenges from outside (from external actors or from other CSOs) seem to be less prevalent in all contexts compared to challenges from within the organisation. The grounds for challenging individual leaders appear more professional than ideological, concerning issues such as their ideas about organisational development, their decisions, or their leadership style. Civil society elites from the UK stood out from the others by more often reporting cases of a medium degree of contestation, such as lack of representativeness and discrimination within the sector. These issues reflect a currently lively debate regarding diversity in the UK, which has so far not been as intense in the other countries.

In Sweden and the UK, challenges against the organisation seemed to be largely driven by competition over resources with other non-profit and for-profit organisations, while such challenges were mentioned less often by Polish and Italian civil society elites. Polish leaders, in particular, more often emphasised ideological conflicts and reported challenges by external actors—not least the government. Given what research has shown about the state of civil society in Poland, political challenges of this kind are hardly surprising. However, in Sweden and the UK as well, many respondents told of ideological challenges from either external populist and right-wing groups or from ideological opponents within civil society. We had expected family issues and religious issues to be bones of contention in Italy and Poland, but were more surprised that they were battlegrounds in secularised countries such as Sweden and the UK.

Our study provides some insights into country-specific conditions for civil society elites in terms of perceived challenges and challengers, the grounds of contestation, and how profound these contentions are, but more research is needed. It would be interesting, for example, to examine the differences in experiences between civil society elites who represent service delivery organisations and those who advocate for rights and justice and are considered particularly threatening to many regimes.