ADVOCACY, ENGAGEMENT, AND THE PUBLIC
THE NONPROFIT SECTOR IS A NOISY WORLD, as organizations rally for particular causes, mobilize constituents, and press for certain policies. Nonprofits both advocate for their interests and are used by others as a venue for causes. As the chapters in this section show, advocacy efforts shape public policies at multiple levels of government. Nonprofits are also crucial in shaping public opinion and in sustaining the envisioned role of the public in society. These chapters emphasize the growing advocacy efforts by traditional public charities, the more aggressive social movement activism and lobbying of political nonprofits, and the role of the nonprofit media in building conceptions of the public. Across these diverse settings, several themes recur, harking back to the conceptual threads in the volume’s earlier section on the politics of the public sphere. Most dramatically, the world of advocacy and public opinion is a highly political one, fraught with tensions between competing political ideologies. We again see that resources carry weight as wealthy donors push their agendas and preferences through advocacy and the media. Together, the chapters analyze changes in how constituencies or publics can be organized, issues of representation and authenticity, the relationship between business elites and purportedly public good organizations, and broader questions of democratic deficits and civic capacity.
In Chapter 20, David Suárez highlights the social change activity of organizations that have received comparatively little attention in the broader literature on advocacy—those that are formally chartered as traditional service-providing public charities. Suárez outlines how advocacy is developing into a core component of the tactical repertoire of 501(c)(3) public charities, becoming a legitimate tool for pursuing mission. His starting point is a large and distinctive body of work on the influence of private organizations on civic participation. The tendency of individuals to form and become members of voluntary associations was a central focus of Tocqueville’s authoritative investigation into democracy in early nineteenth-century America. These foundational observations inspired much subsequent academic inquiry, demonstrating that traditional membership organizations often model democratic processes and participatory practices. Besides reinforcing democracy by acting as “laboratories for citizenship,” many membership organizations mediate the relationship between individuals and their government by fostering a commitment to civic engagement.
Suárez argues that their history of civic engagement puts public charities in an increasingly strong position to engage in advocacy at the organizational level, a dynamic and powerful approach for achieving social change. He builds a framework for systematically studying features of organizations and their environments that influence the advocacy outcomes of charitable nonprofits. The framework emphasizes the inputs that shape nonprofit advocacy, but he goes further to end with a discussion of the opportunities and challenges associated with investigating outcomes. Suárez highlights salient, underexplored research questions on the role of private organizations in social change, drawing primarily from sociology, political science, and interdisciplinary fields such as public policy, public management, international relations, and nonprofit studies.
In Chapter 21, Edward T. Walker and Yotala Oszkay take stock of broad trends in nonprofit advocacy in the twenty-first century, focusing on the U.S. experience. Whereas the previous chapter focused on the role of 501(c)(3) public charities, their focus is on a rise of nonmembership advocacy organizations (NMAOs), such as policy planning organizations, think tanks, and advocacy-driven operations focused on deploying professional skills to advance particular causes. Trade associations have become central vehicles for advancing the interests of firms and industries in broader political discourse. Think tanks are a growing site for deploying knowledge and science in the service of politics. And formally organized social movement and political entities have come to play a critical role in advocating for social, economic, and political change. In a context marked by the rising prominence of NMAOs, they provide a rethinking of many enduring assumptions about the political role of the third sector.
Walker and Oszkay underscore the tension between the democratizing potential of nonprofit advocacy organizations versus the features of contemporary advocacy nonprofits that either reinforce “de-democratizing” tendencies or reflect a broader democratic recession. They unpack these tensions along six key dimensions: (1) features of advocacy nonprofit organizational structures that may support or challenge democratic outcomes; (2) pressures toward accountability by third-party monitors, which often deploy metrics that may disadvantage advocacy nonprofits, particularly those that engage in grassroots organizing; (3) questions of whether nonprofits challenge versus reinforce inequalities; (4) the rising use of nonprofits as political intermediaries for corporations or other interests—including concerns about the practice of “astroturfing” and the rise of “dark money” social welfare organizations; (5) practices of advocacy nonprofits that, separate from their structure, may limit democratizing potentials; and (6) the role of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in reshaping the practices of advocacy nonprofits. These factors are used as the basis for drawing tentative conclusions regarding the prospects for nonprofits as sources of democratic civic and political action in light of a challenging external sociopolitical environment.
In Chapter 22, Mike Ananny draws our attention to the role of nonprofit media in helping envision and create conditions for collective, communicative self-governance. Starting with a tour of U.S. journalism’s historical orientations to news organizations and proceeding through a discussion of the financial and technological forces shaping contemporary nonprofit news, he introduces a typology that maps press funding techniques onto normative models of the public. The typology provides a tool for scholars and reflective practitioners alike to think about how nonprofit funding gives rise to networked publics, demonstrating how choices about the institutional design of nonprofit news have consequences for the kind of democratic self-governance that media systems can support.
Ananny reveals the intersection between the types of publics that emerge from different media systems and, in particular, from nonprofit media, through a three-part structure. First, he traces the institutional forces that have historically driven the nonprofit news sector, examining several canonical examples for evidence of how the nonprofit understood its institutional conditions and what it saw as its public responsibilities. Second, he inspects a recent expansion in the nonprofit news sector. He observes not only the appearance of not-for-profit news publishers creating original stories, but also of a new set of actors including philanthropists driving news experimentation, research organizations guiding best practice, and digital crowd-funding platforms transforming individuals into donors and participants. Today’s nonprofit news sector is a mix of patrons, publishers, and platforms pursuing sharply different images of public service, media accountability, and civic participation. Finally, Ananny explores how historical forces and contemporary dynamics point to persistent, cross-cutting normative themes in nonprofit news. The intersections, compliments, and frictions of yesterday’s and today’s news sector come together to create a rich picture of how institutional dynamics shape broader ideals of journalistic trust, participation, and accountability.
The role of nonprofit organizations in advocating for public policies is well established, as nonprofit organizations have long sought to provide representation for particular interests, communities, and geographic regions. But in a period of rising inequality and civic transformation, the character of such advocacy has changed markedly. A growing array of private organizations contribute to social change by advocating for “their” causes. More indirectly, these actions contribute to involvement in community activity by shaping definitions of the public. Nonprofits increasingly act as intermediaries between corporations and policy makers, ranging from transparent and aboveboard partnerships all the way to covert “astroturf” campaigns. Most notably, nonprofits play a vital role in shaping flows of knowledge and authoritative information, defining public views on key issues of the day. With the growing influence of nonprofit advocacy and shifting vehicles for pursuing change, questions about how and when private organizations drive social change take on renewed urgency and centrality.