Leveraging Nonprofit and Voluntary Action Research to Inform Public ...

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The Policy Studies Journal, Vol. 45, No. 1, 2017

Leveraging Nonprofit and Voluntary Action Research to Inform Public Policy Brenda K. Bushouse The field of nonprofit and voluntary action (NVA) studies in the United States originates in the 1970s and has since grown to encompass multiple scholarly associations around the world and graduate degree programs producing faculty with NVA as their primary scholarly focus. This article introduces readers to the NVA field by describing the development of the field, its scholarly associations and publication venues, and education programs. The second section discusses three areas of foundational research: why nonprofit organizations exist, why people give, and nonprofit relations with government. Each of these areas can be drawn upon by public policy scholars to more fully understand how individuals and nonprofit organizations participate in the policy process. The final section identifies three nexuses with policy process: policy design, advocacy, and the role of foundations. These are three areas that have significant potential for research collaborations to connect NVA with policy process literature. KEY WORDS: nonprofit, voluntary, foundations, advocacy, policy design

Introduction The field of nonprofit and voluntary action (NVA) studies began emerging in the 1970s and is the newest of the three overview perspectives presented in this volume. NVA scholars contribute knowledge focused on the phenomena of people coming together for a common purpose. That purpose varies extensively from faithbased congregations, joining a club, nonprofit provision of social welfare services, to mobilizing for policy change. These phenomena vary to the degree to which the activities take place in voluntary, informal settings to institutionalized nonprofit organizations. In the U.S. context, the federal income tax code includes 29 different 501(c) designations all of which receive tax exemption (Internal Revenue Service, 2016).1 There are approximately 1.4 million nonprofit organizations registered with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS; McKeever, 2015) of which nearly 90,000 are foundations (Foundation Center, 2013). The nonprofit sector contributed approximately $900 billion to the U.S. economy in 2013, which is 5.4 percent of gross domestic product (McKeever, 2015). NVA scholars are drawn to studying these institutions and the

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Bushouse: Leveraging Nonprofit and Voluntary Action Research

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people who participate in them and yet as a prominent nonprofit scholar writes, “it is surprisingly difficult to comprehend how pervasive, ubiquitous, and complex the sector is” (Grønbjerg [2012] in Ott & Dicke [2012, p. xii]). Research on U.S. NVA can be traced back to de Tocqueville’s (1969) discussion of the role of communal institutions to moderate despotism of the majority and the mores, which he referred to as “habits of the heart,” that underlay American democracy (pp. 287–90). Historian Peter Dobkin Hall provides a rich perspective, as only an historian can, on how the actions by individuals to “do good” evolved in the United States. His work is important for reminding scholars that 501(c) designation by the IRS is a twentieth century innovation. Prior to the creation of the tax code for nonprofit organizations, those who came together to “do good” were organized in a variety of ways, some closely associated with religion, government, and private enterprises (Hall, 2006). The temporal and comparative variation in what governments choose to do or not to do (Dye, 1979) creates the environment in which NVA can flourish or founder. Public policy and NVA are deeply entwined in the empirical world but that has not translated to the scholarly world as much as one might expect. Some notable NVA scholars are also public policy scholars; however, there are surprisingly few NVArelated publications in the Policy Studies Journal (PSJ). The earliest contribution is in 1983 titled, “Policy Directions and the Nonprofit Sector: Elements of an Integrated, Comprehensive Agenda” (Schooler, 1983). It was followed in 1985 with a second attempt to connect policy and nonprofit research (Miller & Collins, 1985), but it was not until about 16 years later that additional NVA research appeared in PSJ. To date, PSJ published NVA research related to implementation of public policy (Chambre, 1999; LeRoux, 2011), venue shopping (Buffardi, Pekkanen, & Smith, 2015), donor contributions and fundraising (Brooks, 2004; Nicholson-Crotty, 2011), professional associations (Candler, 1999), lobbying and advocacy (Wyszomirski, 1998), nonprofit management (Brooks, 2006), impacts of public funding (Jung & Moon, 2007), and most recently, a conceptual approach to understanding the service delivery and advocacy roles of nonprofit organizations (Fyall, 2017).2 These are important crossfield contributions but there are more that can be made. The purpose of this article is to identify nexuses between public policy and NVA that will lead to fruitful paths of knowledge generation. It is important to note that because the focus of this article is on connections between NVA and public policy, it is not intended to exhaust the entirety of the NVA field. Consequently, there are important areas of NVA research that will not be included such as social enterprises and associational activity unrelated to the public policy. There is a vast literature on nonprofit management that will receive only brief attention (see Sowa & Lu, 2017, for nonprofit/public management connections). But just as it is difficult to bound the NVA field, it is necessary to bound the public policy field. In this article, my objective is to identify connections between policy process research and NVA research. There are considerable opportunities to connect research on particular policy domains, implementation (see Sandfort & Moulton, 2015), and evaluation but the policy process focus reflects that of Weible and Carter (2017).

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Policy Studies Journal, 45:1

In the article below, I begin with a description of the evolution of NVA as a field of study including its scholarly associations and education programs. From there I summarize contributions to foundational areas of NVA scholarship that can inform public policy including: why nonprofit organizations exist, voluntary giving of time and resources, and the relationship between nonprofit organizations and government. With that background information, I then turn to three nexuses for future research: policy design, advocacy, and the role of foundations in the policy process. The article concludes with current efforts to bridge NVA/PP research, cross-field publication venues, and developing cross-field research networks. The Evolution of the NVA Field The origins of the field come from disparate people coming together to ask basic questions about the role of nonprofit organizations as legal entities and the evolving scope of private actions in the name of the public good. An important impetus was the Tax Reform Act of 1969, which created a host of new rules for nonprofit organizations, and particularly for foundations. Tensions between foundation giving and government monitoring were not new but the extent of debate over the role of private philanthropy led John D. Rockefeller III to fund a private citizen board titled the Commission on Private Philanthropy and Public Needs, but better known as the Filer Commission. The board commissioned studies and, after two years of study, made recommendations that supported the case for the independence of a “third sector” distinct from government (Commission on Foundations and Private Philanthropy, 1970). The board staved off calls for greater regulation of foundations but it also spurred the growth of research on nonprofit organizations. Foundations funded the creation of the Independent Sector in 1980 to build research capacity and strengthen the sector. Independent Sector,3 through the efforts of Virginia Hodgkinson, worked to create basic data sources through the National Center for Charitable Statistics (NCCS; now housed at the Urban Institute’s Center of Nonprofits and Philanthropy). At the time, there were varied state policies and charity ratings (e.g., Better Business Bureau Wise Giving) but national-level data were inaccessible. Efforts to develop those data led to the creation of the National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities code and the translation of the IRS form 990 into usable data (Elizabeth Boris, personal communication by phone, March 29, 2016). By the 1990s these data sources, funded by foundations and created by NCCS through concerted efforts by important founders of the NVA field, made it possible to analyze the scope and variation of the sector. Foundations continue to be important sources for funding NVA research. The Aspen Institute, with funding from multiple foundations and under the leadership of Elizabeth Boris, created Nonprofit Sector Research Fund, to provide grants for dissertation fellowships and nonprofit research. Scholars such as Mark Hager, currently the editor of Nonprofit Management and Leadership, and the author’s dissertation research were funded through Aspen’s fellowship program. Aspen shifted its focus to Philanthropy and Social Enterprise but continues to fund important work on the sector (see


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discussion of Hammack and Anheier [2013] and Anheier and Hammack [2010] below). Scholarly Associations and Publication Venues Two scholarly associations, formed in the 1970s, focused attention on understanding nonprofit organizations and voluntary associations, respectively. The first association, formed in 1971, was the Association for Voluntary Action Scholars (AVAS). Founder David Horton Smith chose “Voluntary Action” based on the book by Beveridge (1948) with that title (Smith, 2003). AVAS drew scholars, particularly from social work but also other disciplines, who shared an interest in understanding voluntary, common interest associations. The second association, founded in 1978, was the Program on Non-Profit Organizations at Yale University with the mission “to foster interdisciplinary research aimed at developing an understanding of nonprofit organizations and their role in economic and political life” (Program on NonProfit Organizations, 2016). Law professor John G. Simon served as the first director, in cooperation with eminent public policy scholar Charles E. Lindblom, until 1982. The focus was on both nonprofit organizations and philanthropy, a topic discussed in more detail below. This was an important hub that created foundational research for the new NVA field of study. An important foundation of the field is that both of these associations attracted scholars from multiple disciplines. There continues to be recognition among NVA scholars that no one discipline can provide answers to the questions we commonly ask. Our disciplinary training provides a lens to understanding research questions but there is an appreciation that we need to bring multiple disciplinary approaches to answer those questions. It is challenging work to organize across disciplines, something that public policy and NVA scholars have in common. In the 1980s, efforts mounted to expand AVAS to include research on nonprofit organizations. David Horton Smith (2003) recounts those challenges but for the purposes of this article, the important issue is the marriage of VA with NO in the early 1990s. Through the efforts of presidents Thomasina Borkman (1991–92) and copresidents Richard Steinberg and Kirsten Grønbjerg (1993–94), AVAS was renamed the Association for Research on Nonprofit and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA). The current description of the association reads, “ARNOVA is the leading interdisciplinary community of people dedicated to fostering through research and education, the creation, application and dissemination of knowledge on nonprofit organizations, philanthropy, civil society and voluntary action” (Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action [ARNOVA], 2016). Throughout the 1990s, ARNOVA grew into the hub for NVA scholars and currently has about 1,200 members (ARNOVA, 2016). ARNOVA publishes Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly (NVSQ; ranked 8 out of 41 journals in Social Issues with an impact factor of 1.491) (Sage Journals, 2016). The sections of ARNOVA reflect the multidisciplinary nature of the association: Community and Grassroots Associations; Theories, Issues and Boundaries; Values, Religion, Altruism, and Drawbacks; Social Entrepreneurs/Enterprise; Governance; Emerging Scholars.

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Similar to public administration, there are ongoing efforts to connect theory with practice; ARNOVA has a Pracademics section that connects academics and practitioners and also a Teaching section. ARNOVA developed with primarily U.S.-based membership and its conferences have been held in the United States (and once in Canada). An internationally focused association of mainly European scholars formed their own association in 1992. The International Society for Third-Sector Research (ISTR) chose a different term to capture its focus on “promoting research and education in the fields of civil society, philanthropy, and the nonprofit sector” (International Society for Third-Sector Research, 2016). With 600 members and an annual conference that rotates around the globe, it attracts a more geographically diverse membership, although approximately 50 percent of its members are European and 20 percent from North America (ISTR 2014 Annual Report). There are regional networks in Africa, Asia and Pacific, Latin American and Caribbean, and Europe. ISTR publishes Voluntas whose aim is to be the “central forum for worldwide research in the area between the state, market, and household sectors” (Springer, 2016). ISTR also launched a Nonprofit and Civil Society book series (Paul Dekker and Lehn Benjamin, editors). There are also country-based and regional associations emerging across the globe. In Great Britain, the Voluntary Sector Studies Network convenes scholarly conferences and publishes the Voluntary Sector Review. In the southern hemisphere the Australia and New Zealand Third Sector Research has been active for 20 years with biennial conferences and publishes the journal Third Sector Review (for history, see Onyx [2011]). NVA scholars specializing in nonprofit management participate in management associations and publish NVA research. The Public Management Research Association includes nonprofit organizations as “public institutions” when they contract with governments and because of their distinct public purposes and implications (Public Management Research Association, 2016). Articles with nonprofit management topics appear in the association’s Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory. Academy of Management, while mainly focused on the business sector, explicitly includes nonprofits in the Public and NonProfit Division. The Division had 855 members in 2015 and has a number of sponsored publications (Academy of Management Public and Nonprofit Division, 2016).4 The American Society for Public Administration created a separate section for nonprofit scholars and practitioners through its Nonprofit Policy, Practice and Partnership section5 and its journal, Public Administration Review, publishes research featuring nonprofit organizations. The public management and NVA connections are well established through research networks and publication venues and this extends to hybrid associations such as the Association for Policy Analysis and Management. This association focuses on both policy and management, which attracts NVA scholars, particularly those whose research focuses on management of service delivery nonprofit organizations. Its journal, the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, publishes NVA articles. A search for journal articles with “nonprofit” in the title resulted in over 450 articles.


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Specialized Educational Programs Similar to the professional degree programs in public policy and public management, there are specialized educational programs for training nonprofit managers. The impetus came from the Independent Sector that, with foundation funding, encouraged the formation of nonprofit academic centers to professionalize managers of service delivering nonprofit organizations. The first Nonprofit Master’s program was created in the 1980s at the Mandel Center at Case Western Reserve University and the number has now grown to 260 universities with nonprofit management curricula (some of which are degrees) and 49 Ph.D. programs that include nonprofit management education courses (Seton Hall University, 2016).6 Similar to the accreditation process through Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs, and Administration, the Nonprofit Academic Centers Council created standards for nonprofit degree programs (Nonprofit Academic Centers Council, 2016). The growth of academic programs, in turn, created rapid growth and fundamental shifts within the NVA community. As someone who entered the field in the late 1990s, the pace of growth is nothing short of astounding. The field is heterogeneous in its research topics, its disciplinary perspectives, and research methods (Bushouse & Sowa, 2012). Within the scope of this article, my objective is to focus on those areas of NVA scholarship that overlap, or should overlap, with the study of the policy process. In the section below, I focus on NVA contributions in three foundational areas that serve as a starting point for a discussion of NVA/PP nexus: social origins of the nonprofit itself, voluntary giving of time and resources, and nonprofit–government relationships. It is beyond the scope of any one paper to summarize the contributions of the NVA field in its entirety and there are admittedly important contributions that are excluded that could inform public policy research. But I encourage future authors to expand and deepen this dialogue. The NVA Field as It Relates to Public Policy Scholars drawn to research on NVA bring disciplinary lenses from political science, economics, sociology, public administration, social work, history, and legal studies to our research. The challenge for NVA scholars is that the choice of theory depends on the research question, far more than in public policy research. Unlike policy process theories, there is no culminating event akin to passage of legislation. This is reflected in the “state of the field” publications. Sabatier and Weible’s (2014) Theories of the Policy Process is the result of three editions of dialogue among different strands of theory. These debates over what constitute theory enriched the public policy field through its dialogue. In the NVA field, The Nonprofit Sector: A Research Handbook edited by Walter W. Powell and Richard Steinberg, second edition published in 2006, is the “state of the field” text available for NVA researchers and students (Powell & Steinberg, 2006).7 Its 27 chapters are divided into 6 parts that cumulatively make it a weighty volume, both literally and intellectually. Its chapters present the state of knowledge for a particular topic. Advances since publication tend to zoom

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into a particular research topic and are featured in edited volumes and journal special issues. In the section below, I begin with a review of three areas of NVA scholarship that bridge to public policy. A fundamental question for NVA scholars is why nonprofits exist. There are established theoretical perspectives that differ in their basic assumptions. I then turn to a discussion of why people give their time and money. This topic is of central importance in NVA literature because civil society and the nonprofit sector fundamentally depend on giving for their continued existence. The final section focuses on the relationships between government and nonprofit organizations with a discussion of the U.S. historical context and important contributions. Why Do Nonprofits Exist? The multidisciplinary NVA field as we understand it today is based on contributions with disciplinary roots. The first two discussed, Contract Failure and the ThreeFailures approach focus on explaining commercial, entrepreneurial nonprofits (i.e., those with self-perpetuating boards who sell services in the marketplace). Thus, it attempts to explain a segment of the nonprofit sector. Civil society, social movement, and neoinstitutionalist explanations incorporate expressive motivations for voluntary action, which may or may not lead to the creation of a nonprofit organization. Frumkin (2002) defines expressive as the “fellowship and self-actualization experienced by those who give or volunteer” (p. 23). These latter approaches recognize the civic and political engagement functions of NVA and their use as vehicles for expressions of values and faith. Contract Failure Theory. Legal scholar Hansmann (1980) developed the Contract Failure theory of demand: individuals will choose to purchase goods and services from nonprofit organizations when it is difficult to assess their quality (e.g., care for an elder with Alzheimer’s disease) because of the “nondistribution constraint,” which is the IRS’s requirement that all 501(c)-designated nonprofit organizations reinvest all profit back into the social mission of the organization. Theoretically this requirement would decrease the incentive for service providers to cheat the customer even when cheating would be difficult to discover. The assumptions are that (1) the nondistributional constraint actually affects the quality of service delivery and (2) that consumers are knowledgeable enough to know the auspice of the service provider. Readers familiar with the Institutional Analysis and Development Framework (Ostrom, 2011; Ostrom, Cox, & Schlager, 2014) will quickly recognize that the nondistributional constraint is a meta-constitutional rule but that service delivery is an operational-choice level action arena. Whether it actually has an impact on service delivery depends on the monitoring and sanctioning mechanisms at the meta, constitutional, and collective-choice levels (see Bushouse [2011] for an application to childcare service delivery). Two supporting arguments were made in favor of greater trustworthiness of nonprofit organizations: “entrepreneurial sorting” might draw people to work in the nonprofit who have different personal objectives than those who work in for-profit firms (Hansmann, 1980; Young, 1983, 1986) and Ben-Ner and


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Van Hoomissen (1993) hypothesized that demand-side stakeholder involvement in the nonprofit organization (donors, members, and clients) would positively impact trustworthiness. The nondistribution constraint led scholars to search for evidence that nonprofit provision of services was superior to that of for-profits, particularly in services for which quality of services is hard to evaluate such as hospitals (Ferris & Graddy, 1989), nursing homes (Ben-Ner & Ren, 2015; Weisbrod, 1988; Weisbrod & Schlesinger, 1986), and childcare centers (Kagan, 1991). Sector-based behavioral assumptions became more problematic as nonprofit organizations diversified revenue streams. Fee for services and revenue generation through sales led to concerns about nonprofits losing sight of their social missions or the phenomena of “for-profits in disguise” as nonprofits (Hirth, 1999) and nonprofits with “paper boards” (Bushouse, 1999). Particularly after the 1996 U.S. welfare reform legislation that led governments to contract with for-profit firms to deliver human services in the belief that the profit motive would yield efficiencies, scholars critically assessed the meaning of “nonprofit” when services are bought and sold similar to profit-maximizing firms (Eikenberry & Kluver, 2004). Three-Failures Theory. Economist Weisbrod (1977) developed the DemandDiversity Model to explain government and nonprofit provision of goods under conditions of market failure. The choice between nonprofit or government provision depends on the heterogeneity in the quantity of collective goods8 demanded for a given tax level. He hypothesized that governments would tend toward the median voter’s preference for supply levels, which results in government failure for those whose demand is unmet. Individuals with excess demand may decide to form a voluntary association to supply additional services.9 In this formulation, the emergence of nonprofit organizations is the result of market and government failure. Political scientist Lester Salamon countered with the theory of Voluntary Failure in which it is the failure of voluntary associations to meet demand that then leads to government provision. Voluntary failure can result from (1) philanthropic insufficiency (demand outpaces supply), (2) particularism (under provision for some ethnic groups, religions, and geographic areas, or ideological beliefs), (3) paternalism (divergence of perceived problem and solutions between those providing and those receiving), (4) amateurism (Salamon, 1987, 1995). Cumulatively these are known as the Three-Failures Theory (Steinberg, 2006), which is an elegant framework, if only it consistently explained empirical reality. Steinberg details these shortcomings and focuses on developing a more complete theory of supply of nonprofit organizations. Steinberg notes that the efficiency-based models do not represent the full range of values important to understanding nonprofit organizations (Steinberg, 2006, pp. 128–29). These are similar concerns as exist in the policy literature when discussing efficiency versus equity (Stone, 2012). There are values beyond efficiency that are important to consider in the supply of and demand for nonprofit service provision. The desire to hold on to the uniqueness of the nonprofit organizational form is further challenged by the evolution of social enterprises. The legal forms for enterprises that seek to achieve both profit and social missions are evolving into hybrid forms some of which are for profit (Schmidt, 2016).

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A recent contribution by Aligica (2015) seeks to replace the Three-Failures Theory, with its origins in neoclassical economics assumptions of equilibrium and optimization, in favor of a “symbiotics” framework informed by Hayekian economics. Rather than market-based assumptions of allocative efficiency, the symbiotics framework focuses on questions of adaptive learning that occur in the context of rules, incentives, and beliefs. In this perspective, there is no optimization objective in a market exchange. Since this is a recent publication, its potential for forthcoming contributions remains to be developed. Civil Society Explanations. Origins explanations for nonprofit organizations in the United States often begin with Alexis de Tocqueville’s observation that America’s democracy rests on the intermediary role of it voluntary associations.10 Hayek’s (1960, 1979) critique of the modern welfare state was that centralized planning by the government reduces freedom and can lead to tyranny. Research from this perspective views government intervention as having a depressing effect on community and voluntary associations. In contrast, the communitarian view is that government and voluntary associations support one another (see the works of Amitzai Etzioni and Benjamin Barber). Communitarians are far more focused on the creation of norms and place important emphasis on the role of voluntary associations in mobilizing demand for policy change. Putnam (1993) brought attention to the role of voluntary associations in bringing people together for the common good. In this view, government policies can have both positive and negative impacts on nonprofit organizations and their ability to create social capital (Putnam, 2000). But as Smith and Grønbjerg (2006) conclude, “Although some scholars have challenged the validity of Putnam’s arguments and evidence, his perspective has gained popular acceptance with far-reaching effects on public policy, the relation between government and nonprofit organizations, and nonprofit views of themselves and their relations to the community” (p. 231). Social Movement Origins. Social movements encompass a broad area of scholarship with many variants but all involve the process of people coming together to advocate for change (Benford & Snow, 2000; Gamson, 1975; Tarrow, 1994). Social movements, “provide the organizational and political mechanisms for translating private concerns into public issues” (Smith & Grønbjerg, 2006, p. 232). These mechanisms are important areas of study to understand how voluntary action becomes institutionalized as nonprofit organizations. The social movement itself may develop into a new nonprofit (e.g., the Civil Rights movement led to the creation of Children’s Defense Fund) or bring together a range of nonprofit organizations into a coalition (Imig, 2014) and, if the movement results in policy change, then nonprofit organizations may implement those changes (Fyall, 2017; Sandfort, 2014). Neoinstitutionalists. Neoinstitutionalists “bring the state back in” to the social origins debate (Rothstein & Steinmo, 2002; Skocpol, 1999; among others). They emphasize the role of legal and political institutions on the origins and roles of the nonprofit sector. Salamon and Anheier (1998) created a country classification system for the nonprofit sector based on interactions between citizens and institutions. Countries are classified across four regime types (liberal, corporatist, social democratic, and statist) according to government social spending and size of nonprofit


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sector. The emergence of the regime is due to the historical interactions between political regimes and their interaction with social classes. This approach is particularly important for distinguishing among the different types of institutions and the roles that they play in the provision of goods and services, supporting/competing with one another, and how these interactions change over time. Critics of this approach include measurement methodology (underestimating the role of religious organizations) and its inability to explain rapid change in the sector (Moore, 2001; Morgan, 2002; Smith & Grønbjerg, 2006). But critics aside, it has created a methodology and supported data collection that facilitate cross-country comparative research. Voluntary Giving In 2015, over $373 billion was donated for charitable purposes with 71 percent donated by individuals and the remaining from foundations (16 percent), bequests (9 percent), and corporations (5 percent) (Giving USA Foundation, 2016). The phenomenon of philanthropic giving occupies many NVA scholars’ research agendas. NVA researchers have extensive descriptive statistics on the who, what, and how of giving through empirical data collected by universities, think tanks, and government reports (Havens, O’Herlihy, & Schervish, 2006)11; however, the “why” requires theory-driven research and this focus preoccupies many NVA scholars. In the research on why people give, there is an emphasis on tax policy and the incentives it creates (Simon, Dale, & Chisolm, 2006; Wilson, 2012); however, instrumental models of behavior are not able to explain why people give, choose not to give, or have the desire but are unable to give. This requires attention to the expressive functions of giving (Frumkin, 2002). NVA scholars research philanthropic giving and also individuals’ time through voluntary action to nonprofit organizations, social movements, and membership associations (nonprofits that rely on their members’ donations of time and/or money for their continued existence). There is voluminous scholarship on the act of volunteering time from a management perspective (Brudney, 2009; Brudney & Gazley, 2002, 2006; Brudney & Meijs, 2009; Hager & Brudney, 2005; Handy, Mook, & Quarter, 2008). Similar to the research on philanthropy, the theoretical understanding of why people volunteer cannot be fully explained by instrumental reasons. Recent research on membership and mutual benefit organizations advance a systems theory approach for understanding why individuals join and actively participate in associations. In a 2014 special issue of NVSQ, the editors Gazley and Tschirhart point scholars in the direction of expanding from instrumental motivations toward models incorporating “bridging and bonding dynamics; socialization effects, and structural, technical, and political barriers to membership” (Tschirhart & Gazley, 2014, p. 11S). Nonprofits and Government Nonprofit organizations and voluntary actions by individuals intersect with government at every level and every part of the policymaking process. Nonprofit

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organizations are both the target population for policy (state incorporation and tax laws and federal tax laws), the mediating institutions for delivering government services, and the advocates for target populations who receive government services. Incorporation and tax laws create the fundamental tensions between nonprofits and governments (Abramson, Salamon, & Steuerle, 2006; Brody & Cordes, 2006). NVA scholars Boris and Steuerle (2006) capture the expansive and complex relationships in their edited volume Nonprofits and Government: Collaboration and Conflict. With a third edition published in 2016, the volume provides important knowledge on topics of policies, practices, and values that create collaboration in some areas and conflicts in others. Recent U.S. history illustrates why “collaboration and conflict” is in the title. The sector experienced rapid growth in the 1960s in response to new programs created as a result of the Civil Rights movement and the War on Poverty. The federal government shifted from contracting through states who, in turn, contracted with nonprofit organizations, to contracting directly with local nonprofit organizations. This change effectively bypassed structural racism in state governments and it also created pressures for professionalization of nonprofit organizations (to administer programs) and increased demand for nonprofit organizations. From this moment forward, the number of nonprofit organizations skyrocketed to reflect increasing prevalence of contracts for the delivery of publicly funded programs. Government’s reliance on nonprofit organizations to deliver the services created opportunities for collaboration but also tensions within nonprofit organizations around professionalization and advocacy. The Reagan Administration’s efforts to decrease the role of government led to greater reliance on contracting out public services resulting in the “hollow state” (Milward & Provan, 2000). The heavy reliance on contracting arrangements, particularly for social welfare services, created deep connections between public managers responsible for the contracts and nonprofit organizations to deliver the services (Grønbjerg & Salamon, 2012; Smith & Lipsky, 1995; Young, 2006). It is in this broad area of research that public management and NVA scholars connect most (see Sowa & Lu, 2017). There are important core topics of management that public and nonprofit scholars share (e.g., leadership, human resource management, strategic decision making, program evaluation, contracting, collaboration, among others) but there are important divergences related to managing volunteers (see Brudney references above), boards (Ostrower & Stone, 2010), and the “double bottom line” of attaining financial goals and mission.

NVA Nexus with Public Policy In this section, I focus primarily on connecting the policy process framework literature with NVA. While there are many other nexuses that can be explored to advance knowledge of public policy through greater integration of NVA, the following three are particularly promising directions: policy design, nonprofit advocacy, and the role of foundations in the policy process.


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Policy Design Policy scholars concerned with the role of citizens in democracies focus on the impacts of policy design on citizen participation through frameworks such as the Social Construction of Target Groups (Schneider & Ingram, 1997), Policy Feedback Theory (Mettler & SoRelle, 2014), Narrative Policy Framework (McBeth, Jones, & Shanahan, 2014), and Institutional Analysis and Design framework (Ostrom, 2011; Ostrom, Cox, & Schlager, 2014). These frameworks all focus, to some extent, on the messages citizens receive from government and the subsequent impacts on their perceptions of government, and their participation in civil society and democratic processes. But they do not draw on NVA literature to the extent one would expect. Smith and Lipsky’s Nonprofits for Hire (1993) is the classic source for bringing attention to the role of mediating institutions in communities to provide services but there is a wealth of NVA literature that can be utilized to expand understanding of the roles these institutions have in public policy. NVA scholars research faith-based (e.g., Bielefeld & Cleveland, 2013a, 2013b), mutual benefit societies (e.g., Baggetta, 2015), communal philanthropy (Eikenberry, 2006), and other voluntary associations that bring citizens together in ways that create social capital. Sometimes these voluntary actions through mediating institutions are directly targeting public policy processes. But even when they are not, they have indirect impacts on citizen engagement in civil society. NVA scholars research, similar to the policy process research, places importance on how beliefs impact actions. What NVA scholars can contribute is knowledge on bridging and bonding between citizens, citizen engagement with mediating institutions, and how mediating institutions relate to governments. The connections between research on voluntary action and public policy are developing through scholarship such as Dodge’s work on deliberative democracy (Dodge, 2014, 2015; Dodge & Ospina, 2015). But for public policy scholars who study policy design and its impacts on target populations, there are abundant opportunities for cross fertilization. Policy Advocacy There is a great deal of attention on advocacy in the NVA literature, some of which crosses into policy literature (Buffardi et al., 2015; Fyall, 2017; Pekkanen, Smith, & Tsujinaka, 2014). NVA scholars research the dynamics of advocacy both within nonprofit organizations (capacity and constraints) and across the sector (impacts of government funding on advocacy) and can be drawn on to expand what is now the lumped category of interest groups in the broader Political Science literature (Berry & Arons, 2005). For example, Mettler’s (2011) Submerged State provides an illustrative example of the opportunity for forging deeper connections with NVA literature. In her study she focuses on the growing distance between the beneficiaries of government policies and their knowledge that the government is providing those services due to what public administration and NVA scholars have referred to as the “hollow state” (Milward & Provan, 2000). As a policy scholar, she is surprised at the

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lobbying of “charities” to oppose changes to the tax code related to health care reform because the change would have reduced the tax deduction for donations. By contrast, an NVA scholar would expect those nonprofits with budgets dependent on charitable giving to oppose changes. Similarly, Mettler’s account does not recognize that the Chamber of Commerce, National Federal of Independent Businesses, and AFL-CIO are all nonprofit organizations. The heterogeneity of the sector often gets reduced to the 501(c)(3) “charities” without recognition of the full array of nonprofit forms, including those whose main purpose is lobbying such as 527 Political Action Committees, as well as the lobbying activities of 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations or 501(c)(5) unions. This is not a criticism of Mettler but rather an illustrative example for how policy scholars would benefit from a broader understanding of the heterogeneity of nonprofit organizations and the substantial research on the varying roles of nonprofit organizations in policy advocacy. One of the reasons that these two literatures have not talked to each other very well is that each tends to focus on one type of nonprofit organization. Political Science tends to focus on nonprofit organizations whose primary focus is advocacy (501(c)4 and 527 nonprofit organizations whereas NVA scholars tend to focus on 501(c)3 nonprofits whose primary focus is service delivery but who also advocate for their target populations. Greater understanding of the complex array of nonprofit organizations, as well as associational activity, in the mobilization for policy change would inform our understandings of policy processes. Two recent contributions to the NVA advocacy literature are of note. Schmid and Almog-Bar’s (2014) symposium in NVSQ provides an international perspective on advocacy and engagement by nonprofit organizations delivering human services. Some empirical research indicates that as nonprofit organizations contracted with governments to deliver human services, their advocacy activities decreased (Berry & Arons, 2005; Boris & Maronick, 2012) whereas other researchers found contrary evidence (Chaves, Stephens, & Galaskiewicz, 2004; Mosley, 2011). The symposium’s articles include new theoretical directions for understanding advocacy including use of moral frames for advocacy (Garrow & Hasenfeld, 2014), Bourdieu’s theory of Capital Benefit (Greenspan, 2014) as well as empirical studies of advocacy activities including funders directing advocacy (Jung, Kaufmann, & Harrow, 2014) and use of Twitter (Guo & Saxton, 2014). The second contribution is an edited volume focusing on nonprofit and advocacy through the lens of government retrenchment. Editors Pekkanen, Smith, and Tsujinaka (2014) discusses the challenges of studying advocacy due its definitional and measurement challenges. They define advocacy as, “the attempt to influence public policy, either directly or indirectly” (p. 3). Using insider/outsider and indirect/direct activity they distinguish among lobbying, policy advocacy, protest, and public education. This volume addresses important definitional variations within the policy advocacy literature. Because the actual activities undertaken vary and the organizations undertaking these activities can be organized (at least in the U.S. context) as different types of 501 (c) nonprofit organizations with differing laws governing their activities, precision in language is of paramount importance. The volume’s chapters focus on the dimensions of advocacy at the local, state, and national levels and the


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politics, strategy, and tactics nonprofits employ on behalf of target populations such as children (Imig, 2014), human service recipients (Sandfort, 2014), and marginalized groups due to post-hurricane Katrina (Strolovitch, 2014). Many of these authors are political scientists and that bodes well for creating cross-field awareness but there are opportunities for building specifically with public policy scholars. Two PSJ articles recently featured cross-field research. Fyall (2017) proposes the Advocate-Provider framework to explicitly recognize that nonprofit organizations participate in both the policy formation through advocacy and policy implementation through their service delivery. Buffardi et al.’s (2015) study informs the process of venue shopping (legislative/executive, level of government) and venue specialization (concentrating on one venue versus shifting among venues). These studies represent how cross-fertilization between NVA advocacy research and public policy can advance knowledge.12 Role of Foundations in the Policy Process Foundations are important players in the policy process and yet they receive scant attention from current-day public policy scholars (Bushouse, 2009). But back many decades ago, sociologists and political scientists debated the role of elites in society and foundations were included in their models of policymaking. The work of C. Wright Mill, G. William Domhoff, and Thomas Dye from the elite power theory perspective clashed with the pluralist perspective of Robert Dahl, among others. The elite power theorists gave foundations a privileged role in the policy process. In Domhoff’s (1998) version of elite power theory, foundations play a role in both policy formation and the “ideology” process (i.e., the formation, dissemination, and enforcement of attitudes and assumptions that permit the continued existence of policies and politicians favorable to the wealth, income, status, and privileges of members of the ruling class). In Dye’s (1979) schematic of the policy process, foundations receive their money from wealthy individuals and corporations that then provide grants to major universities and policy think tanks that, in turn, provide research personnel to government commissions and councils. These experts are featured by the national news media and affect all branches of the government through their policy reports and recommendations and generation of media attention. The challenge is that there are 90,000 foundations in the United States and they are far more diverse in their missions and giving programs than ideology processes; however, there has not been theory developed that can encompass their role in policy processes. There are rich case studies of big foundations such as the Carnegie Corporation (Lagemann, 1989) and the Rockefeller Foundation (Brown, 1979) and for particular eras such as Sealander’s (1997) history of foundations and public policymaking from the Progressive Era to the New Deal and Weaver’s (1967) history of American foundations through the mid-1960s. There are studies critical of the role of foundations in society, most notably Nielsen’s (1972, 1985) The Big Foundations and The Golden Donor. More recently, historian David Hammack and Helmut Anheier published two books, funded by the Aspen Institute, focusing on history and

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modern-day complexity of foundations in the U.S. context. The first is an edited volume, American Foundations (2010), that focuses on the roles and contributions of foundations for specific policy domains and their roles in social movements and advocacy. Smith (2010) contributes a chapter on foundations and public policy that provides a useful description of the historic tensions between foundations activities and government oversight. The second book is an examination of foundations from the industrial age and into the twenty-first century (Anheier & Hammack, 2010). It provides an historical overview for how foundations emerged as vehicles for philanthropy during the industrial revolution and subsequent concentration of wealth, how they adapted to post-World War II expansions of government, and the new transformation in the twenty-first century. Other NVA scholars focus on the practice of foundation giving with the goal of improving effectiveness of their giving programs. Since its creation in 2000, the University of Southern California (USC) Center of Philanthropy and Public Policy uses research to inform philanthropic decision making with particular focus on foundations that engage in public policy to solve community problems (see Ferris, 2009, 2010; Ferris, Sharp, & Harmssen, 2010; Ferris & Williams, 2010, 2013; and also http://cppp.usc.edu/for additional research). The success at USC is the result of sustained connections forged between California foundations and USC. But in general, the challenge for research on foundations is, as foundation insider Fleishman (2007) notes, their lack of accountability and transparency. Scholars utilize public data from IRS form 990-PF and annual reports (see Mosley and Galaskiewicz’s [2010, 2015] use of these data to analyze foundation giving for social change leading up to the 1996 welfare reform legislation). Bushouse (2009) utilizes backward mapping of funder acknowledgments to track giving to universal preschool research and advocacy, which is useful for uncovering opaque giving strategies for policy change. But beyond these sources and methods, access depends on the foundation and its gatekeepers. It also depends on the researchers’ ability to fund research that may result in critical findings of foundations’ giving programs. Biting the hand that feeds is not a particularly effective strategy for researchers who seek access or funding. All of the works cited above are dealing with power, whether indirectly or directly, but none of these contributions attempts to provide a theory of foundations’ role in public policy. Part of the challenge is that the term foundation includes such a vast diversity of organizational sizes, missions, and giving strategies (Smith, 2010). Even if we limit to those foundations with giving programs aimed at policy process, there is still tremendous variation in activities and scope. While there is important scholarship on improving the practice of philanthropy (such as Ferris, 2009; Frumkin, 2006), theory on the role of foundations in public policy remains an underdeveloped, but potentially fruitful, path for shared NVA and public policy research. Future Directions The three nexuses identified in the article represent promising areas in which cross-field collaboration could advance knowledge. Cross-field collaboration is already occurring in some research projects, new publication venues, and


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scholarly networks. From the NVA perspective, there are several new developments connecting NVA and public policy research. The policy field framework being developed by Grønbjerg and Smith (2015) focuses on the relationships among government and nonprofits but also the market and informal sectors. To date, the authors examined variation among five policy fields and the factors responsible for the variation. The authors state, and I agree, that the framework “offers the predictive capacity to generate hypotheses and research designs for additional research” (Grønbjerg & Smith, 2015, p. 1). An alternative approach developed by Stone and Sandfort (2009) uses the same term, policy field, but the focus is on the bottom-up view in local policy contexts.13 These are two different approaches to understand the array of actors and their actions in the policy process that more accurately reflect the diversity of nonprofits and their roles in public policy. Some scholars are actively utilizing public policy frameworks to explore NVA research topics. Bushouse, Never, and Christensen’s (2016) special issue of NVSQ features papers utilizing the tools and frameworks developed by Elinor and Vincent Ostrom and colleagues (e.g., Institutional Grammar Tool, SocialEcological Systems, Institutional Analysis and Design Framework). The papers included in the volume build connections between what had previously been parallel research traditions. In terms of publication outlets, in addition to the potential for NVSQ and PSJ to feature cross-field research, the Nonprofit Policy Forum was created in 2010 “to serve as an international journal that publishes original research and analysis on public policy issues and the public policy process critical to the work of nonprofit organizations” (De Gruyter, 2016). With funding from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation (2016), the journal is available in open access format to facilitate distribution of knowledge (Dennis Young, personal communication by Skype, March 4, 2016). There are promising developments within both public policy and NVA scholarly associations. In addition to the inclusion of NVA in this PSJ special issue, the American Political Science Association convened a philanthropy working group at the 2016 annual conference. This first gathering of scholars is directly attributable to having public policy and NVA scholar Steven Rathgeb Smith as the executive director of the American Political Science Association. From the NVA perspective, in 2015 a public policy community of interest met at the annual ARNOVA conference and are beginning to identify ways to create networks among scholars and identifying shared research agendas. In closing, there have been important cross-field publications and collaborations in the past that advanced knowledge, particularly in the area of policy advocacy. In the future, we have the opportunity to forge scholarly networks that can grow into research collaborations with publications in both NVA and public policy journals. The nexus identified in this article is a first step in charting out three areas for collaboration. But these are by no means the only, and some may argue that other areas should have been highlighted. In the spirit of intellectual curiosity, I encourage readers to go forth and prosper.

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Brenda K. Bushouse is associate professor of political science and public policy in the Department of Political Science and School of Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Notes 1. Nonprofit organizations are created at the state level but must register with the IRS to gain tax exemption. 2. PSJ publishes multiple articles on voluntary approaches to environmental regulation of firms (Berliner & Prakash, 2015; Blackman, 2008; Prakash & Potoski, 2007; among others); however, these are focused mainly on business–government relationships. 3. At its founding, Independent Sector was the hub for bringing together researchers to study the nonprofit sector. Since that time, the focus of Independent Sector evolved into a resource for nonprofit and philanthropic organizations. Its activities focus on advocating for the sector, providing resources and training for nonprofit leaders, and an annual thematic conference. 4. The PNP does not have a division journal but rather lists the following sponsor journals: American Review of Public Administration, International Journal of Organization Theory and Behavior, International Journal of Public Sector Management, International Public Management Journal, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Journal of Public Administration & Research, NVSQ, Nonprofit Management and Leadership, Public Administration Review, Public Management Review, and Review of Public Personnel Administration. 5. The Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management focuses on public management and does not explicitly include reference to nonprofit organizations (Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management, 2016) and therefore was excluded. 6. Roseanne Mirabella of Seton Hall University (former president of ARNOVA), collects annual data on nonprofit management education and publishes it in a searchable database geared toward matching potential students with programs (see http://academic.shu.edu/npo/). 7. There are several nonprofit management textbooks designed for teaching (e.g., Renz et al., 2010; Tschirhart & Bielefeld, 2012), and Ott and Dicke have published several edited volumes of collected works. But the Powell and Steinberg volume is the only one focused on research. 8. Weisbrod (1977) uses the term “collective-consumption good,” which he defines as a good that “can be enjoyed by a number of people simultaneously” (p. 11). It is important to note that this definition only includes jointness of use and not exclusion. If he had included exclusion, then he could have distinguished more carefully public, toll, and common pool resources. This is particularly important for toll goods because they often have mixed industries of public, nonprofit, and for profit (e.g., childcare, nursing homes, hospital, schools). 9. Weisbrod (1977) lays out three other options for individuals with excess demand: move to a different political unit, form a lower-level government unit to provide additional service to themselves, or substitute private goods for the collective goods (p. 60). 10. Smith and Grønbjerg (2006) provide a careful articulation of this literature dividing it into civil society, social movement, and regime and neoinstitutional perspectives. 11. Indiana University-Purdue University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy has an array of research projects that provide useful data and analysis including: (1) Giving USA is published annually since 2000 and reports on the donations by individuals, corporations, foundations and bequests to charities and religious organizations (see givingusa.org); (2) the Philanthropy Panel Study is a biannual, longitudinal study of family’s giving and volunteering in the United States; (3) other studies target particular types of donors (e.g., high amount, high net worth, gender) as well as categories of donations (e.g., disaster relief, faith based). The nonpartisan think tank, The Urban Institute Center of Nonprofits and Philanthropy publishes the Nonprofit Almanac that includes data on charitable giving and volunteering (see McKeever [2015] for a brief report on trends) and recently published the first survey of family foundations (Boris, De Vita, & Graddy, 2015). There are also government sources such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Expenditure Survey (see http://www.


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bls.gov/cex/) that provides interview survey and diary survey data on the buying habits of American consumers. 12. Fyall and McGuire (2015) published “Advocating for Policy Change in Nonprofit Coalitions” in Nonprofit and Voluntary Quarterly. Taken together, Fyall’s work speaks effectively to both NVA and PP scholars. 13. See Sandfort and Stone (2008) for an application of their policy field approach to teaching.

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