THE CHANGING FACE OF NONPROFIT ADVOCACY
Democratizing Potentials and Risks in an Unequal Context
Edward T. Walker and Yotala Oszkay
DIVERSE ANALYSTS, GOING BACK AT least to Alexis de Tocqueville ([1835] 2003), have pointed to the critical role that advocacy groups play in supporting a healthy and vibrant civic enterprise, the social integration of communities, and the responsiveness of policy makers to the diverse needs and interests of their constituents (Barber 1984; R. Putnam 2000; Lichterman 2006; Sampson et al. 2005). Substantial literatures document how nonprofit advocacy groups help expand civic engagement, call attention to underrepresented constituencies, and foster democracy more broadly (for reviews, see Fung 2003; J. Jenkins 2006; E. Walker 2013b). In recent decades, this idea has been reinforced by those who hold out hope for advocacy groups as sources of meaningful civic integration and public participation but also contested by others who worry that the changing features of organized civil society are preventing these groups from effective action. These concerns point to polarization, inequality, and interactions among increasingly politicized corporations, democratically challenged governments, and wealthy individuals as factors limiting the potential for advocates to foster democratic outcomes (Lee, McQuarrie, and Walker 2015; Skocpol 2003, 2004; Skocpol and Williamson 2016; Skocpol and Hertel-Fernandez 2016; Soss and Jacobs 2009; Norris 2011; E. Walker 2014; I. Martin 2013). As we discuss in this chapter, although the assumption is often that more advocacy will mean stronger democratic representation, that is not always the case.
This mixed combination of factors has generated a palpable ambivalence among scholars about the prospects for nonprofit advocates to compensate not only for deep and serious democratic deficits in many contemporary societies (Norris 2011; Wolin 2017) but also for a crisis in institutional trust, particularly among young people (e.g., Bonikowski and DiMaggio 2016). In the United States, for instance, many analysts suggest that political advocacy groups tend to reinforce the unequal context in which they operate (Lee et al. 2015). Others have noted that wealthy constituencies have found novel means by which to mobilize mass advocacy on their behalf (E. Walker 2014; I. Martin 2013; Phillips-Fein 2009). Additionally, the largely donor-driven push toward standardization and commensuration for nonprofits may be having negative consequences for the advocacy sector, as advocacy groups typically do not offer easily quantifiable deliverables (Teles and Schmitt 2011). Lastly, new information and communication technologies (ICTs), initially envisioned as tools of broad-based collective empowerment, may be reinforcing communicative and participatory echo chambers. Users of ICTs in civic contexts may be less likely to encounter opposing views or alternative perspectives (e.g., Boutyline and Willer 2016; Sunstein 2018) and more likely to engage primarily in transactional rather than substantial styles of participation (e.g., Shulman 2009; but see Karpf 2010).
In this chapter, we examine general trends in nonprofit advocacy with respect to democracy in the twenty-first century. We focus our investigations primarily on the United States. Following Charles Tilly (see Tilly and Wood 2013), we understand democracy to be “relatively broad and equal citizenship” tied to binding consultation of citizens with regard to state personnel and policies, along with the protection of citizens from arbitrary state action (and without severe restrictions on access to citizenship itself). We perceive a tension between the potential for nonprofit advocacy groups to serve as sources of democratic engagement and their tendency toward reinforcing a broader context in which democracy appears to be receding (see Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018). We examine six key areas in which scholars have made substantial contributions to understanding the prospects for (de-)democratizing activity by nonprofit advocates: (1) structural features of advocacy nonprofit organizations; (2) pressures toward accountability by third-party monitors; (3) inequalities in the broader social context; (4) the rising use of nonprofits as political intermediaries for corporations or other interests; (5) practices of advocacy nonprofits that may limit democratizing potential by prioritizing mobilizing over organizing; and (6) the role of ICTs in reshaping the practices of advocacy nonprofits.
As in the previous chapter, we understand advocacy organizations to be associations that “make public interest claims either promoting or resisting social change that, if implemented, would conflict with the social, cultural, political, or economic interests or values of other constituencies and groups” (Andrews and Edwards 2004:481; Suárez, Chapter 20, “Advocacy, Civic Engagement, and Social Change”). The scope of our investigation is focused on nonprofits, including those incorporated as conventional charities (under code 501(c)(3)), social welfare organizations (under code 501(c)(4)), and private foundations that engage in advocacy. We do, however, note that not all advocacy organizations are incorporated as nonprofits, and indeed most associations are informal, grassroots, and unchartered; David Horton Smith (1997) appropriately labeled such associations the “dark matter” of the nonprofit sector. Diverse and influential contemporary social movements—including many that have become very prominent, such as Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and Never Again—are not, in large part, centrally organized around nonprofit structures (although some have become established in response to these movements, such as Stand with Parkland, Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, and Black Lives Matter Foundation). This lack of formal incorporation poses a challenge for scholars, who may need to rely on domain-specific censuses of organizations within particular issue areas (for an illustrative example regarding local environmental associations, see Andrews et al. 2016). We return to these considerations later in the chapter, especially as they relate to shifting nonprofit structures and new uses of communications technologies in organizing.
Changing Nonprofit Organizational Structures
As the previous chapter observed, in recent years the nonprofit sector has become increasingly professionalized. Similar to other organizational fields that have witnessed increasing “marketization” (Kraatz and Zajac 1996; Berman 2011), increased participation in higher education and pressures for greater efficiency and accountability have led to a new class of nonprofit and advocacy professionals who, with their credentialed expertise, help nonprofit organizations become more “businesslike” (Dart 2004; Hwang and Powell 2009; King 2017; Jordan and Maloney 1997; Bosso 2005; McInerney 2014). Such trends can be observed in the field of advocacy and civic engagement, where paid professionals and business elites have taken on the advocacy tasks typically associated with social movement activists (a trend harking back to the classic arguments of John D. McCarthy and Mayer N. Zald (1973, 1977). This professionalization has influenced changes in the organizational structures of nonprofit advocacy groups that may limit their potential democratizing benefits.1
One such emergent nonprofit advocacy structure, the nonmembership advocacy organization (NMAO), has drawn particular attention along these lines. NMAOs are entirely staff-driven, functioning as a pure form of professionalized advocacy group. In a study of Washington, D.C.–based organizations, Debra Minkoff, Silke Aisenbrey, and Jon Agnone (2008) found that NMAOs made up about 25 percent of advocacy organizations, with an additional 10 percent of the sector comprising organizations that form a decentralized nonmembership advocacy network. NMAOs—often self-described as institutes, centers, funds, projects, or task forces (Walker, McCarthy, and Baumgartner 2011)—vary in their advocacy activities and the extent to which these activities are seen as overtly political.
For example, one well-researched NMAO is the Children’s Defense Fund (Skocpol 2003), directed by the charismatic former civil rights movement leader Marion Wright Edelman, which works to advance antipoverty policy and focuses on prototypical forms of nonmembership advocacy such as direct-mail fund-raising, lobbying, research, media outreach, and coalition building (Minkoff et al. 2008; Skocpol 1999; Walker, McCarthy, and Baumgartner 2011). Public interest legal advocacy groups are another important type of NMAO, emerging out of the “cause lawyering” of the 1960s (see Sarat and Scheingold 1998). Such groups deploy legal expertise to advance litigation and provide defense for individuals and activist teams in the name of a specified movement (Scheingold and Sarat 2004). Although groups working on civil rights issues—such as the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the American Civil Liberties Union—were typically associated with this form of professional advocacy, the years that followed involved a major expansion of conservative legal advocacy organizations (Southworth 2004; Teles 2008).
Think tanks, as nonmembership professional organizations comprising experts who specialize in forms of knowledge production, were also put to highly politicized uses. Both popular and scholarly discourse vacillate between (1) characterizing think tanks as organizations that explicitly work to advance (often elite) political goals (Peschek 1987), in which case they are often described as “policy planning organizations,” and (2) portraying them as autonomous entities whose research and analyses remain largely independent of political and economic interests (McGann and Weaver 2002). Thomas Medvetz, in his study of think tanks (2012), traces the emergence of the contemporary think tank to the progressive and conservative politics of the 1960s and 1970s. Activists on both the left and right, he argues, were skeptical of the technocratic experts affiliated with government. In order to challenge these experts’ conclusions, they formed organizations like the Institute for Policy Studies (on the political left) and the Heritage Foundation (on the right), thereby occupying an “interstitial” space between academic, political, business, and media fields (see also Rich 2005; Himmelstein 1992). Although progressive organizations initially inhabited a substantial part of this space, their relative influence has receded. Conservative think tanks have come to dominate the field because of higher levels of support from big business and greater autonomy from academic institutions (Medvetz 2012).
The emergence of the think tank field, as Medvetz and other scholars have suggested, took place alongside a larger conservative project of launching nonmembership organizations that work to advance free enterprise policy. The 1960s also saw the rise of business associations like Business Roundtable and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (Gross, Medvetz, and Russell 2011; Medvetz 2012; Mizruchi 2013; Vogel 1996). Through such organizations, business elites mobilized to scale back government regulation, taxes, and union power, arguing that the social safety net could be replaced with private support and institutions (Mizruchi 2013). Although, as Mark Mizruchi notes (2013), these changes were seen as victories by conservatives, they ultimately led the corporate elite, once able to collectively organize for policies that benefited both business and society (e.g., supporting full employment, civil rights, poverty measures, and environmental policies), to become victims of their own successes: more fragmented and less collectively effectual (even if individual firms and industries are quite powerful today).
Other important transitions in advocacy structures are reflected in the recent prominence of “philanthrocapitalism” (Bishop and Green 2010), in which the private donations of individual economic elites are becoming more central to nonprofit advocacy. On both the left and right, highly successful business entrepreneurs like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Oprah Winfrey, and the (far more partisan) Koch brothers have established private foundations that fund think tanks, advocacy organizations, and other nonprofits. Analysts that celebrate these efforts suggest that such individuals can transfer the skills that brought them success in the market to achieving important social goals (Bishop and Green 2010). However, some argue that the logic of philanthrocapitalism—that is, an individualistic, market-based approach to philanthropy—runs counter to the spirit of civil society, therefore undermining any collective forms of advocacy (Edwards 2008). As Garry W. Jenkins (2010) argues, through large donations and the increasing use of limited-purpose grants, such foundations have generated disproportionate control over nonprofit advocacy efforts.
Indeed, these trends toward the professionalization and personalization of advocacy have prompted many scholars to contemplate the implications for broader questions of democracy and representation. The most popular of these arguments have been advanced by Robert D. Putnam (2000) and Theda Skocpol (1999, 2004; see also Fiorina 1999), who note that such trends correspond with declines in civic engagement and increasing inequalities in representation and political participation. Although it would not be reasonable to attribute these changes solely to nonmembership groups—indeed, there was no proportional increase in the prevalence of NMAOs relative to membership associations in the closing decades of the twentieth century (Walker, McCarthy, and Baumgartner 2011), shifts in participatory practices of both membership and nonmembership groups—such as less reliance on bottom-up processes of representation and greater attention to outside donors—reflect the increasingly unequal and polarized social and political environment in which they now operate.
Accountability Pressures
The increased professionalization of nonprofit advocacy is taking place concurrently with the development of evaluation tools and metrics to assess the social impact of nonprofits (Polonsky and Grau 2010; Sloan 2009; Cordery and Sinclair 2013; Berghmans, Simons, and Vandenabeele 2017; Jepson 2005). Although this change is not uniformly negative—and, as we describe, may improve some aspects of organizational performance—there is also evidence that this shift may restrict the capacity for advocacy nonprofits to advance democratic practices. This is the case because these metrics generally reward organizations that focus on providing direct services rather than organizing constituencies.
As advocacy nonprofits are becoming more professionalized and driven by the interests of paid staff, stakeholders are concerned about whether their contributions are being put to good use. Such concerns, and documented cases of nonprofit managers misappropriating organizational resources (Gibelman and Gelman 2004), have prompted new methods for transparency and the emergence of third-party monitors and raters, often called “charity watchdogs” (Szper and Prakash 2011). However, the effects of such quantification (and the commensuration of practices they likely encourage) are unclear. Many scholars are now asking how best to measure the messy world of advocacy and whether such metrics can be applied fairly or will inevitably discourage certain types of efforts that do not easily lend themselves to quantitative analysis.
Nonprofit assessment is typically conducted for the benefit of institutional and/or individual donors (Cunningham and Ricks 2004), both of which make contributions to nonprofits in the hope of advancing some cause. Although foundations (institutional donors) often have paid professionals on staff to manage evaluation, individual donors, despite providing the bulk of charitable giving, are rarely as cognizant about whether an organization is “efficacious” (Cunningham and Ricks 2004). Third-party rating agencies—such as Charity Navigator, GuideStar, and the Better Business Bureau’s Wise Giving Alliance—attempt to close this knowledge gap by providing assessments of nonprofits based on financial health and annual reports. Although some agencies use qualitative measures to assess a nonprofit’s performance, these organizations tend to rely heavily on financial data provided by IRS Form 990 and financial statements (Lowell, Trelstad, and Meehan 2005; Polonsky and Grau 2010). Ratings are based on how a nonprofit allocates funds to particular activities such as fund-raising and charitable services (Cordery and Sinclair 2013; Polonsky and Grau 2010).
These quantified financial metrics to assess nonprofits pose a number of concerns for the advocacy sector. Most directly, such metrics tend to account for all staffing expenses as part of associations’ administrative overhead costs, which penalizes advocacy groups that focus on grassroots organizing rather than service provision. Such metrics may disincentivize donations to groups that engage in democratic organizing and reward those who put more of their effort into programs and services. Such notions are consistent with research on “reactivity” in organizational fields (Espeland and Sauder 2007), which suggests that organizations often revise their activities when they are being measured on a particular performance metric. Accountability metrics may present advocacy as a “bureaucratic drag” on resources, thereby constraining efforts to advance social causes (Jepson 2005:517).
Further, some scholars argue that the performance of nonprofits cannot be captured by a singular efficiency metric that examines inputs and outputs (Cordery and Sinclair 2013). This argument is especially salient for advocacy nonprofits given their general and not easily measurable goals of empowering constituencies and engendering sociopolitical change. Relatedly, advocacy efforts rarely follow a linear path (Gill and Freedman 2014). As Steven Teles and Mark Schmitt (2011) point out, advocacy groups frustrate standardized evaluation because the use of one tactic may be effective in one time and place and ineffective in another; campaigns must be continuously adapted to their context and failure is frequent, usually resulting in a “very long slog” toward change (Teles and Schmitt 2011:40). Performance metrics based on the allocation of donor contributions do not adequately account for this complex advocacy environment.
It is not clear, however, whether accountability metrics and ratings agencies are truly consequential for organizational outcomes. For example, in a study of Charity Navigator, Rebecca Szper and Aseem Prakash (2011) found that charity ratings did not have an effect on donors’ support of nonprofit organizations. Margaret F. Sloan (2009), on the other hand, found that nonprofits that were marked “did not pass” on an accountability scale did not see a significant change in donations. Survey research (Van Iwaarden et al. 2009) and interviews with donors (Cunningham and Ricks 2004) suggest that donors do not find much use for the current metrics and that such metrics may actually stand in the way of the perceived efficacy of an organization, in part because it may not be worth devoting scarce resources to such extensive data gathering and measurement.2 Many respondents in Kate Cunningham and Marc Ricks’s study (2004) expressed that focusing on evaluation metrics would detract from more important goals and hinder donor–nonprofit relations.
Some scholars conclude that evaluation metrics must move beyond crude measures of outcomes to consider more complicated processes of social change. Teles and Schmitt (2011) argue that donors should ignore metrics altogether and instead evaluate advocacy groups more holistically. Such an approach might involve “spread betting”—funding various organizations, strategies, and issues and focusing on long-term portfolios of advocates. Others recommend the involvement of stakeholders in evaluation and an ongoing dialogue about missions and values (Jepson 2005). This involvement approach may allow advocacy organizations to adapt their strategies to better represent their constituents and donors, ultimately becoming more efficacious in navigating the “slog” of social change.
Negotiating Inequalities: Beyond Social Capital
Social change is understood to be a central goal of nonprofit activity. The prevailing image of the nonprofit sector, particularly with respect to nonprofits that provide social services, depicts organizations providing social supports that compensate for the limitations of public welfare programs and failures of the marketplace (Weisbrod 1977). These efforts, and the philanthropy that makes them possible, are believed to help ameliorate social inequalities (in intention, if not always in outcome; see Prewitt 2006). Advocacy nonprofits are also expected to provide redress against social inequalities: they help galvanize political pressure to generate changes in government programs or other redistributive efforts (McCarthy and Walker 2004), procure funds to support social service nonprofits (J. Jenkins 1998), and support private efforts by firms or industries to assist vulnerable communities (Hall 2006). Indeed, it is telling that McCarthy and Zald’s (1977) definitive paper, which shaped more than a generation of scholarship on social movements and advocacy, described a social movement as “a set of opinions and beliefs in a population which represents preferences for changing some elements of the social structure and/or reward distribution of a society” (McCarthy & Zald 1977:1217–1218, italics added). There is, then, some expectation that nonprofit advocates support efforts to generate a more equitable distribution of societal resources.
A related expectation, rooted in neo-Tocquevillian ideas (R. Putnam 2000), holds that civic associations help build social capital. This connective process provides numerous benefits to communities, one of which is increasing the potential for equity and inclusivity (Portes 1998). However, this form of “positive” or “bridging” social capital is not the only relational feature that can emerge out of civic engagement and associated networking. “Negative” or “bonding” social capital serves primarily to reinforce exclusive ties based on homophily (Portes 1998; Portes and Landolt 2000). Because the bridging form has received the lion’s share of scholarly attention, there is a widespread expectation that civic participation will help challenge social inequalities through the formation of broad-based social networks that cut across divides of party, race, class, and other key social cleavages. Empirical findings on social capital, diversity, and interpersonal trust, however, do not always support this hopeful narrative (Costa and Kahn 2003; Portes and Vickstrom 2011; E. Walker and Stepick 2014; R. Putnam 2007).
A variety of critiques have begun to emerge, pointing out that although many social advocacy nonprofits are focused on challenging inequality, they are nonetheless operating in an environment in which social inequalities are rapidly proliferating, and they are not immune from the problems that manifest in such a context (see Lee et al. 2015). Skocpol (2003) highlighted how widening political polarization and income inequality have coincided with the advocacy landscape shifting from broad associations that integrate members across social classes toward single-issue associations with less internal diversity. Other scholars have described shifts toward “protest businesses” (Jordan and Maloney 1997) or similarly supply-side-focused advocacy efforts (Bosso 2005; Brady, Schlozman, and Verba 1999) that focus heavily on the interests of particular donors, rather than organizing constituencies across a broader range of demographic backgrounds. These shifts are also reflected in the changing membership structures of associations and the rise of philanthrocapitalism described earlier in this chapter.
Further, as a variety of critiques have begun to point out, the participatory engagement that nonprofit advocacy groups facilitate may help reinforce broader social inequalities rather than challenge them. Public consultation and facilitation of participation is often used by political and business elites to generate buy-in for programs that exacerbate inequalities (Lee, McNulty, and Shaffer 2013; I. Martin 2015). For example, this concern has been expressed regarding World Bank programs that have participatory features, which may limit and constrain the political power of deliberative processes (Ganuza and Baiocchi 2012). Similarly, in many participatory settings, people with the highest levels of income and education tend to be significantly overrepresented because advocacy organizations and other political recruiters selectively target these groups, knowing they are most likely to contribute their time (Brady et al. 1999; E. Walker 2008, 2014). Further, in a politically polarized environment, political organizers are likely to seek out those who agree on highly charged issues rather than actively work across those divides. Finally, as we discuss in the next section, there are also strong tendencies toward using nonprofits as agents of outside interests, particularly by political and economic elites.
The Rise of Nonprofits as Political Intermediaries for Elite Interests
The question of whether nonprofits serve as intermediaries for outside interests predates the current context. For instance, the first U.S. political consulting firm, Campaigns Inc., effectively mobilized third-party advocates to defend their corporate clients in the 1930s (Sheingate 2016). There have always been some concerns that nonprofits are used by outside interests to advance their agendas. Consider how trade associations advance business interests (Aldrich and Fiol 1994), service-providing nonprofits often carry out the tasks called for by government principals (Marwell 2004), and other nonprofits act as proxies for the preferences of wealthy donors and foundations (see Prewitt 2006). This issue has taken on new meaning and significance, however, in the twenty-first century. New technologies, changes in U.S. electoral spending laws, and the increasing political mobilization of the business sector have combined to provide a fertile environment for using nonprofits as mediators between well-resourced third parties and policy makers.
We note three phenomena in the present rise of nonprofits as political intermediaries for elite interests. The first is the expanding practice of business “astroturfing.” Contrasting with community-driven grassroots organizing, astroturfing artificially creates or prompts nonprofit intermediaries to (often covertly) advance the interests of a firm or industry (E. Walker 2014; see also Walker and Rea, 2014). The second phenomenon, “dark money,” uses nonprofits to surreptitiously influence political campaigns and elections (see Hansen, Rocca, and Ortiz 2015). Third, strategic political philanthropic efforts are used to fund allied nonprofits that advocate for policy changes that benefit the economic interests of a business or powerful individual (see, e.g., Rothman et al. 2011). Although each of these undertakings is distinct, these uses of nonprofits as political intermediaries raise similar questions about the trustworthiness of nonprofits and challenge expectations that nonprofits can be assumed to be significant forces for broader societal democratization. We unpack each of these phenomena next.
Astroturfing can be characterized as advocacy activities that involve (1) heavy (often material) incentives for participants (for instance, “paid protesting”), (2) efforts by the sponsor to distance itself from these political activities by masquerading the nonprofit as an independent effort by civil society groups, and/or (3) forms of fraud (e.g., forged letters, communications shared without consent). For example, after facing major controversies over its store openings and substandard employee benefits practices in 2005, Walmart created the Working Families for Walmart organization to defend the company against its critics and lobby legislators (E. Walker 2014). Airbnb, which has faced challenges from labor unions, incumbent hotel industry interests, and local housing activists, created an advocacy organization to help press for the company’s interests against its opponents (Steinmetz 2016). Tobacco company Altria created Citizens for Tobacco Rights, similar to earlier tobacco-funded organizations such as the National Smokers Alliance (Givel 2007). These third-party organizations, sometimes called corporate “front groups” (E. Walker 2014), are often structured as nonprofit organizations and designed to appear, in most respects, as noncorporate civil society organizations.
The practice of establishing such entities has expanded considerably given the growing field of professional consultants who provide these services to firms (E. Walker 2009, 2014), the reputational sensitivity of firms and the interest they have in signaling the support of civil society organizations, and the interests of the sponsored or partnering nonprofits in expanding their funding base in a period of shifting priorities for foundations, government funders, and other outside patrons. However, because of the heavy funding, infrastructural support and staffing, and ultimate political aims behind such campaigns, public audiences often view such groups with considerable skepticism (E. Walker 2009, 2014). There are substantial risks for both nonprofits and the business interests that strategically use them to gain political advantages; in some respects, these partnership-related risks are similar to those that were described by Joseph Galaskiewicz and Michelle S. Colman (2006) in an earlier edition of this volume.
Dark money refers to campaign contributions made through nonprofit organizations, the sources of which need not be disclosed. Changes in U.S. election laws following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010)—which allowed corporations and labor unions to make unlimited contributions for “express advocacy” and “electioneering communications” out of their general treasury funds—effectively increased the funding and eventual political campaign expenditures of “social welfare” organizations incorporated under Internal Revenue Code section 501(c)(4) (as well as 501(c)(6) trade associations). Such social welfare nonprofits spent $257 million on federal elections in the 2012 election cycle, compared to $86 million in the 2008 cycle (Bass 2016). Given that these organizations are not required to disclose their donations or donors, a broad set of concerns have been raised about how this dark money is unaccountable to citizens, government, or other critical public audiences (Mayer 2016). Although disclosure was not required prior to Citizens United, the ruling unlocked new avenues of spending directly out of corporate treasuries (Winkler 2018). 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations are not, under U.S. law, permitted to have political activities as their “primary purpose,” but the IRS’s capacity for enforcement of this rule has been limited in recent years, the rules are not always clear about how “primary purpose” is defined, and efforts to enforce these rules have faced major backlash when attempted (e.g., Bump 2015).
The use of such nonprofits to advance the political interests of corporations and wealthy individuals, conducted in a way that obscures the ties between these donors and the nonprofits they support, has raised critical questions about the role of such nonprofits in American democracy (Mayer 2016). Although the highly political 501(c)(4) organizations represent only a small fraction of all such social welfare organizations, their use in this fashion prompts analysts to consider (1) whether citizens and policy makers will become less trusting of other social welfare nonprofits, even those that are not serving as political pass-through vehicles for firms and wealthy individuals; (2) whether the political uses of this nonprofit form are exacerbating inequalities in political representation and augmenting problems of democratic deficits and heightened political polarization; and (3) the extent to which the lack of IRS enforcement of the political activities of such groups may have spillover or signaling effects, leading other types of nonprofits to test many kinds of limits on political activities. These areas all have significant potential for future research.
A third way that nonprofits can serve as political intermediaries is through strategic philanthropic efforts by firms, industry groups, or wealthy individuals that benefit the patrons indirectly by funding associations allied with their political or economic interests. A recent study, for instance, found that corporate philanthropic contributions tend to follow similar patterns as other kinds of corporate political engagement, in that “grants given to charitable organizations located in a congressional district increase when its representative obtains seats on committees that are of policy relevance to the firm associated with the foundation” (Bertrand et al. 2018). This would indicate that philanthropy serves as a sort of covert mechanism of corporate political influence. Similarly, Edward Walker (2013a) found that when examining all corporate foundations linked to S&P 500 health firms, contributions from these foundations to charitable causes tended to increase significantly in the year following major corporate controversies, suggesting that philanthropy may play some role in managing firms’ political threats and help to engage in corporate face-saving.
Similarly, patient advocacy organizations often serve as key political intermediaries linking firms and industry groups to policy makers, particularly when a health-related firm or industry is facing a major controversy or regulatory threat (on patient advocacy groups more generally, see Best 2012). Such was the case when pharmaceutical firm Mylan, engulfed in a major scandal over steep increases in the price of its EpiPens, partnered with the nonprofit Allergy and Asthma Network—alongside the American Latex Allergy Association, the Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Connection Team, and the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America—requesting that the government reimburse more of the cost of the treatment (Lipton and Abrams 2016). Similarly, there is evidence that pharmaceutical firms like Eli Lilly strategically fund patient advocacy groups such as the National Alliance on Mental Illness, which is known for its advocacy of drug-based treatments for mental illness in lieu of conventional psychotherapy (Rothman et al. 2011). Medical device manufacturer Medtronic is also known for its strategic donations to heart advocacy groups; the firm is a leader in implantable defibrillator technologies (E. Walker 2013a).
As is clear in many of the preceding cases, there is often a transactional relationship between nonprofits and the patrons who fund them to act as their intermediaries. The distinction between transactional and deeper relational organizing is further explored in the next section.
Mobilizing Versus Organizing: Questions of How Advocacy Nonprofits Engage Mass Participants
In much prior research that considers how advocacy organizations (and social movements more broadly) engage their mass participants, mobilization was used as a covering term for nearly all actions that mass activists take both backstage and in public view in order to advance a social cause or raise a grievance. However, more recent work has encouraged a clearer distinction between mobilizing as the specific public actions that activists take (e.g., protesting, petitioning, writing letters to legislators) and organizing as the backstage work of organization and infrastructure building that helps build long-term capacity for advocacy nonprofits (Han 2014; Brown 2016). Organizing, as understood here, is often underappreciated by both scholars and activists themselves, as such practices normally take place outside public view and do not draw the same attention as (especially more dramatic forms of) public protesting. Organizing is difficult to study, for instance, using the standard tool of protest event analysis—newspaper reports of public protests (see Earl et al. 2004). Newspaper reports typically capture only the mobilization and not the organization building that precedes and/or accompanies it. To study organizing and related internal processes sufficiently, scholars have instead turned to ethnography (e.g., Blee 2012), in-depth interviewing (Han 2014), field experiments (Han 2016), and internal surveys of activist leaders (Andrews et al. 2010). Collectively, these studies provide a much richer understanding of how organizing complements mobilizing, delivering certain benefits that mobilizing alone cannot.
In a groundbreaking study, Hahrie Han (2014) further developed the distinction between mobilizing and organizing (see also Weir and Ganz 1997), highlighting the more “transactional” nature of mobilizing compared to the more durable value of organizing. Consistent with the model of interfaith grassroots community organizing (Walker and McCarthy 2004, 2010; Wood 2002; Warren 2001), organizing practices of the type envisioned by Han (2014) result from the understanding that collective interests often emerge out of the participatory process (rather than playing a strong role a priori; see Munson 2008). In her 2014 study, Han observed that high-engagement organizational chapters—those that performed more long-term organizing and infrastructure building—were much more effective at building long-term engagement and developing grassroots leaders; low-engagement chapters focused on transactional mobilizing, casting a wide net to draw in individuals to take specific actions without meaningfully enrolling them as democratic participants.
The distinction between mobilizing and organizing has clear implications for whether advocacy nonprofits reinforce or overcome democratic deficits in modern societies. Nonprofit advocacy campaigns that focus only on transactional mobilizing run the risk of limiting their democratic potential. A substantial literature has shown that short-term participation does not build the participatory skills that result from meaningful long-term engagement (see Verba, Schlozman, and Brady 1995), nor does it reliably build greater collective capacity (Han 2014). Organizing efforts may also be more effective at bridging various social divides, whether around religion (Braunstein, Fulton, and Wood 2014), race/ethnicity, social class, or other political cleavages (for a review, see E. Walker and Stepick 2014).
There are numerous countervailing tendencies in contemporary advocacy nonprofits’ organizing and mobilizing efforts. On the one hand, there is evidence that organizations focused on low-income communities such as Faith in Action (formerly known as the PICO National Network) are developing substantial campaigns focused on developing thick relational ties in local communities, and that these efforts are having political impacts (see Swarts 2011). We have also seen significant efforts since the 2016 election to develop substantial long-term organizing efforts, such as Indivisible and Organizing for Action, which are currently working on building long-term social infrastructures for electing female candidates (L. Putnam and Skocpol 2018). Yet alongside this trend toward intensive organizing is the appeal of large-scale communications technologies and social media, described in greater depth next, which facilitate the ease of short-term mobilization. The growth of these platforms has raised widespread concerns about transactional participation via “slacktivism” or “clicktivism” (e.g., Shulman 2009). These terms describe short-term actions that neither develop participants’ civic skills nor influence policy, as legislators may discount prompted communications or those that appear to follow a standard script (E. Walker 2014). The ineffectiveness of these practices may, in part, be driving the present search for authenticity in social movement practices (E. Walker and Stepick forthcoming), as well as the interest in building up organizing over mobilizing.
The Changing Technological Environment
Technology is an increasingly prevalent part of citizens’ daily lives, not only in social networks but also on the many online platforms for work, leisure, purchasing, and political participation in which users’ experiences are shaped by algorithm-based decision making and data-driven analytic practices. A ubiquitous question across numerous fields concerns the extent to which technologies are replacing traditional ways of interacting. This trend may lead nonprofit advocacy groups to favor mobilizing over organizing in the contemporary context. Consistent with the private sector’s embrace of social media and other Internet technologies, nonprofits are also now turning to online tools as means for generating attention for and participation in their causes (Asencio and Sun 2015; Guo and Saxton 2014; Kanter and Fine 2010; Young 2017; Bail, Brown, and Mann 2017). The use of such technologies, despite radically lowering the costs of collective action (Bennett and Segerberg 2013), has nonetheless increased anxiety about ICTs’ democratic implications for nonprofit advocacy groups.
Scholars have identified numerous ways in which advocates and social movements more generally turn to technology tools to advance particular causes (e.g., Gainous and Wagner 2013). Despite popular commentator Malcolm Gladwell’s (2010) prediction that the “revolution will not be tweeted,” a hotbed of research has provided substantial evidence to the contrary, especially with respect to the Arab Spring and Turkey’s Gezi Park uprising (see Tufekci 2017). Studies have shown that platforms like Facebook and Twitter facilitate the coordination of protest, with spikes in online activity corresponding to increases in protest turnout (Steinert-Threlkeld 2017; Tufekci and Wilson 2012).
Other work has highlighted how ICTs have constituted new kinds of social movement repertoires. Jennifer Earl, for instance, has extensively examined different forms of Internet activism, such as online-petition signing, email campaigns, and virtual sit-ins (Earl 2006; Earl and Kimport 2011; Earl and Schussman 2008). She and her colleagues identify a typology based on different advocacy purposes including information distribution, facilitating offline protest, generating participation online, and campaigning online (Earl et al. 2010). Similarly, Jeroen Van Laer and Peter Van Aelst (2010) categorize recent social movements involving technology as either “Internet-supported” or “Internet-based,” arguing that social movements that are Internet-based such as online petitions and hacktivism—in which activists hack websites for political purposes—constitute entirely new forms of collective action. David Karpf (2012) documents the “MoveOn effect,” a reference to the policy advocacy group MoveOn.org, describing the rise of new organizations designed around these emerging forms of political advocacy. In this research, scholars show that online technologies are not just channels through which activists communicate and protest is coordinated but also the actual sites of social movement activity. In a recent book, Karpf (2016) describes the practices of these organizations as “analytic activism” using technology and data to listen, monitor, and test alternative strategic approaches in political campaigns.
It is important to resist engaging in technological determinism by overstating the role of ICTs as a politically disruptive force (Howard and Hussain 2013). Such technologies have the potential to reduce participation costs, increase the scale of protest, and help coordinate action, particularly in repressive regimes (Earl et al. 2013; Little 2015). However, scholars are also adamant about pointing out that the traditional means of organizing identified in early social movement scholarship are still consequential for political change (Tufekci 2014). Furthermore, these scholars emphasize that access to such Internet technologies is still stratified, as there is still a meaningful digital divide between those who have easy and regular access to, and feel comfortable using, ICTs and those who do not (Ananny and Kreiss 2011).
Concurrent with this discourse is a discussion about the role of advocacy organizations in the context of such changes. Although research has shown that Internet technologies can serve as powerful organizing tools, studies on nonprofit advocacy and traditional social movement organizations’ use of such technologies illustrate that such organizations largely use them for information distribution and generating attention (i.e., publicizing events and fund-raising unrelated to advocacy) rather than for mobilization (Guo and Saxton 2014; Stein 2009; Young 2017). This work is consistent both with Earl’s findings (2006) that most online mobilization tactics are used by “warehouse sites” (e.g., Change. org or PetitionOnline.org) that are independent from any specific causes or social movement organizations and Karpf’s argument (2012) about the rise of “activity-based” (i.e., user-generated and more open-ended) rather than “issue-based” forms of organizing.
This research points to an “organizational digital divide” (McNutt 2008:2), wherein organizations with limited resources and staff are unable to engage in online advocacy efforts. For instance, Lauri Goldkind (2014) found that younger organizations with the financial and human capital to support technology were more likely to engage in e-advocacy. Exploring nonprofits that serve immigrant communities, Heath Brown (2015) found that more than 50 percent of these organizations do not use social media; furthermore, adoption rates are lowest among Asian American and Middle Eastern American organizations. Brown argues that this institutional divide could translate to a broader digital divide, as social media serves as a primary means through which contemporary voters and activists access political, policy, and electoral information. Together, this research shows that the inequalities permeating organizational structures become reflected in access to these advanced social movement repertoires.
Such changes suggest, at the very least, a division of labor between the new “warehouse” (Earl 2006) or “netroots” (i.e., online-organized; Karpf 2012) organizations and traditional advocacy organizations such that they take on responsibility for different stages of social movement processes. Research has indicated that the newer, online organizational forms may be more useful in the earlier stages, coordinating otherwise disparate activists at scale to generate enough disruption to bring awareness to a cause. The latter organizations, on the other hand, through both traditional means of organizing and the use of technology, may be more effective in the later stages of advocacy, facilitating offline mobilization and sustaining the long-term ties needed to produce more durable social change (Earl 2015).
Conclusions
Nonprofit advocacy organizations play a critical role in American democracy. There are many reasons to hold out the Tocquevillian ([1835] 2003) hope that such associations can continue to serve as a source of voice for underrepresented communities, a force for more equitable representation, and as a means toward broader civic and political cohesion. They may, in the longstanding tradition of research on nonprofits, also help compensate for the problems that emerge from the limitations of government programs and failures of the marketplace.
At the same time, however, a number of critical challenges to advocacy associations may limit their democratic benefits. Shifting membership structures may not as effectively enroll participants in meaningful ways, opting instead for more distant and transactional forms of engagement. Pressures from third-party monitors may incentivize nonprofits to do less organizing and more service provision. Broader social inequalities may encourage nonprofit advocacy groups to engage in supply-side recruitment and resource development strategies that further privilege the most educated and well-resourced. Advocacy organizations may increasingly be deployed as strategic intermediaries to advance the interests of elite patrons or capitalist firms or industries. As a consequence of these changes, advocacy groups may favor transactional mobilizing over deeper and more long-term forms of organizing and movement infrastructure building. Similarly, transitions linked to the rising use of ICTs may lower advocacy groups’ costs of collective action yet facilitate forms of engagement that are less durable and less capable of building broader support.
We are left with a mixed picture of the potential for nonprofit advocates to promote broader democratization in the modern era. We may be reaching a point in which the nonprofit field is relatively saturated without an accompanying growth of civic engagement. Although contemporary society may valorize public engagement, the dominant forms of participation may reinforce tendencies that are either negative or neutral toward democracy. The challenge for twenty-first-century advocacy nonprofits is to find novel strategies for harnessing resources, technologies, social networks, alliances, and broader cultural supports to overcome the significant constraints they face today in promoting a more democratic society.