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Strategy and ideology in nonprofit advocacy organizations

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Strategy and ideology in nonprofit advocacy organizations

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STRATEGY AND IDEOLOGY IN NONPROFIT ADVOCACY ORGANIZATIONS
By

Dyana P. Mason

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfilment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(PUBLIC POLICY AND MANAGEMENT)

Copyright 2014 Dyana P. Mason

i

DEDICATION

To Laura

ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

DEDICATION ...................................................................................................................... i
TABLES .............................................................................................................................. v
ILLUSTRATIONS ............................................................................................................ vii
ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... viii
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................ 1
Definitions and Terms ...................................................................................................... 3
Theoretical Framework .................................................................................................... 5
Studying California .......................................................................................................... 8
Chapter Overview .......................................................................................................... 12
Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 13
CHAPTER 2: ORGANIZATIONS, ADVOCACY AND LEADERSHIP ........................ 15
A Positive Theory of Interest Groups ............................................................................ 17
Ideology and Politics ...................................................................................................... 21
Nonprofit Advocacy Organizations: Definition and Distinction ................................... 26
Role in Politics............................................................................................................ 27
Ownership and Control ............................................................................................... 29
Determinants of Advocacy ......................................................................................... 31
Leadership and Entrepreneurship ................................................................................... 33
Social Entrepreneurs ................................................................................................... 34
Political Entrepreneurs ............................................................................................... 35
Organizational Behavior ............................................................................................. 36
Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 39
CHAPTER 3: A COMMON AGENCY THEORY OF LEADERSHIP IN NONPROFIT
ADVOCACY ORGANIZATIONS ................................................................................... 40
Common Agency versus Stakeholder Theory ................................................................ 41
The Common Agency Framework ................................................................................. 42
Common Agency in Nonprofit Advocacy Organizations .............................................. 46
The Board of Directors and the Executive ................................................................. 47
Adding Policymakers to the Framework .................................................................... 51
Organization Members and Volunteers ...................................................................... 61

iii

Other Principals .......................................................................................................... 65
Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 65
CHAPTER 4: THE COMMON AGENCY FRAMEWORK THROUGH CASE
ILLUSTRATIONS ............................................................................................................ 67
Case Study Methodology ............................................................................................... 68
Case Selection ................................................................................................................ 68
Interview Process ........................................................................................................... 72
Case Study Summaries ................................................................................................... 73
Homeland Security Organization ............................................................................... 74
Good Government Group ........................................................................................... 75
Latino Issues Organization ......................................................................................... 76
Multi-Issue Media Organization ................................................................................. 77
Community Organizing Group/Media........................................................................ 78
Direct Democracy Group ............................................................................................ 79
Youth Advocacy Organization ................................................................................... 80
Local Conservation Group .......................................................................................... 81
Pro-Choice Organization ............................................................................................ 83
Common Agency and Nonprofit Executives ................................................................. 83
The Board of Directors ............................................................................................... 87
Policymakers .............................................................................................................. 91
Members and Volunteers ............................................................................................ 93
Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 96
CHAPTER 5: A CALIFORNIA SURVEY OF NONPROFIT EXECUTIVES, DATA
AND METHODS............................................................................................................... 98
Survey Instrument .......................................................................................................... 98
Sampling Frame ............................................................................................................. 99
Limitations of Data....................................................................................................... 101
Dependent Variables .................................................................................................... 104
Structural Choices..................................................................................................... 104
Advocacy Tactics ..................................................................................................... 105
Independent Variables .................................................................................................. 111
Estimating Ideology .................................................................................................. 112
Item Discrimination .................................................................................................. 114
Item Difficulty/Cutpoint Location ............................................................................ 117
Estimating Ideology of Nonprofit Executives .......................................................... 118
Control Variables ......................................................................................................... 121
CHAPTER 6: ADVOCACY ORGANIZATIONS IN CALIFORNIA .......................... 122

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Sample Analysis ........................................................................................................... 123
Descriptive Statistics of Respondents .......................................................................... 127
Descriptive Statistics of Organizations ........................................................................ 129
Revealed Ideology of Respondents .............................................................................. 133
CHAPTER 7: IDEOLOGY AND ADVOCACY ............................................................ 133
Ideology and Advocacy Tactics ................................................................................... 147
Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 151
CHAPTER 8: IDEOLOGY AND ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE ...................... 153
Hiring a Lobbyist ...................................................................................................... 153
Board Policy Committee .......................................................................................... 157
Empowering Volunteers ........................................................................................... 160
Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 166
CHAPTER 9: CONCLUSION: THE STUDY OF IDEOLOGY AND STRATEGY
GOING FORWARD ........................................................................................................ 167
REFERENCES ................................................................................................................ 173
APPENDICES ................................................................................................................. 193
Appendix A: Survey Instrument .................................................................................. 193
Appendix B: Interview Request Letter......................................................................... 207
Appendix C: Study Information Sheet ......................................................................... 208
Appendix D: Survey Recruitment Postcard ................................................................. 211
Appendix E: Survey Recruitment Email ...................................................................... 212
Appendix F: Survey Recruitment Phone Script ........................................................... 213
Appendix G: Table of NTEE Issue Fields and Frequency in Sample .......................... 214
Appendix H. Roll Call Votes, California Legislature 2012 ......................................... 215

v

TABLES

4.1 Matrix of Organization Size and Ideology 71
4.2 Description of Executives and Organizations in Interview Sample 71
4.3 Common Interview Questions 73
4.4 Typology of Case Illustrations and Common Agency Framework 86
5.1 Frequency of Groups by Issue Field 102
5.2 Inside and Outside Advocacy Techniques 107
5.3 Item Reliability Analysis 109
5.4 Control Variables and (expected signs) with dependent variables 111
5.5 Senate Bill Parameter Results, Key Votes Only (N=40) 115
5.6 Assembly Bill Parameter Results, Key Votes Only (N=80) 116
6.1 Sample Analysis of Respondents, Logistic Regression 125
6.2 Sample Analysis of Anonymous versus Known Groups, Logistic
Regression

127
6.3 Descriptive Statistics of Respondents 128
6.4 Descriptive Statistics of Organizations 130
6.5 Percentage Participating in Specific Advocacy Techniques 131
6.6 Nonprofit Parameter Results (N=217) 134
6.7 Combined Parameter Results, Legislators and Executives (N=337) 138
7.1 Probability of Engaging in Advocacy, Distance from Key
Legislators, probit models (absolute distances)

144
7.2 Regression Co-efficients for Inside and Outside Lobbying 149
8.1 Probability of hiring internal or external lobbyist, distance from
pivotal legislators

155
8.2 Probability of having a policy committee, distance from pivotal
legislators (absolute distances)

159

vi

8.3 Importance of Volunteers to organization, ordered logit 161
8.4 Probability of Allowing Volunteers and Board Members to Select
Techniques or Issues
164

vii

ILLUSTRATIONS

5.1 Ideal point estimates for the California Senate and Assembly,
key votes only

118
6.1 Position executives hold in the organization 129
6.2 Ideology of nonprofit executives, entire group 135
6.3 Difference in ideology based on whether or not their
organization engages in policy or political issues.
135
6.4 Executive ideology by self-reported party affiliation 136
6.5 Executive ideology by self-reported ideology 137
6.6 Executive ideology by organizational issue field 139
6.7 Comparison of the ideology of Senate, Assembly and nonprofit
executives

139
7.1 Predicted probabilities of engaging in policy/political issues by
the executive’s absolute ideological distance from the Senate
median.
145
7.2 Predicted probabilities of engaging in policy/political issues by
the executive’s absolute ideological distance from the Senate
super majority member.
145
8.1 Predicted probabilities of empowering volunteers to select the
organization’s advocacy techniques by the executive’s absolute
ideological distance from the Senate median.
166

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ABSTRACT

Nonprofit organizations often engage in advocacy on behalf of specific groups or the
public at large. Yet, the leaders of these organizations are not well understood although they
play a crucial role in the policymaking processes at the local, state and national levels. While
the literature does embrace the idea of political or policy entrepreneurs as crucial to group
formation and maintenance (Chong 1991; Moe 1988; Kingdon 2003; Wilson 1995; Young
2011), it does not focus on the role of group leaders in guiding the strategic choices of the
organization (Campbell 2005). This leaves a large gap in understanding the role that these
leaders – many of them volunteers – have in guiding their organizations, often having a great
impact on the American political process. This study seeks to address these gaps by offering
a study of these organizations and their leaders.
Drawing from the interest group and nonprofit literatures, I develop a common agency
framework (Bernheim and Whinston 1986) to describe the incentives and constraints that
nonprofit leaders have in making the day-to-day decisions of the organization. Common
agency, developed by Bernheim and Winston (1986), is a “multilateral relationship in which
several principals simultaneously try to influence the actions of an agent” (Dixit, Grossman,
and Helpman 1997), and can be considered a common occurrence in policymaking processes.
This framework provides a powerful, and intuitive, tool with which to evaluate the role of
executives in guiding an organization’s strategy, both directly and indirectly.
Using a mixed methods approach to understanding executives in their organization, this
study presents results from both semi-structured interviews with nonprofit executives, and a
statewide survey of the same. Finding support for the implications expected in a common
agency framework, I argue that nonprofit executives have significant discretion in the

ix

decision-making of their organization. Additionally, I demonstrate empirically that the
revealed ideology of executives has a statistically significant relationship with the advocacy
tactics and internal features present in nonprofit advocacy organizations. Ultimately,
nonprofit advocacy executives should be considered central actors in the American political
process, and their work has great effect on the nature and outcome of policymaking and
political implementation processes.

1

“She who arrives with the first draft, leaves with the last draft”
- A professional mentor, undetermined date
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

This study is about leadership. It is about a particular kind of leadership in a
particular kind of organization - nonprofit advocacy organizations - and is very dear to my
heart. Before entering academia, I spent more than a decade working in the nonprofit sector
trying to move the social change needle on the issues I cared about. I canvassed door-to-
door, engaged in rallies, organized marches and parades, lobbied legislators, spoke before
large gatherings of individuals, testified before legislative hearings, held press conferences,
encouraged people to make contributions to my organizations, oversaw strategic planning for
my groups, managed my staff to maximize their own efforts, built coalitions both inside and
outside my organizations, and did whatever else I could to grow my organizations and build
support for the issues that I worked on. It was an exhilarating career, and one that has taught
me immeasurable lessons about leadership, management, the political process, and the
frustrating and often serpentine nature of policy change. While I always believed that one
person could make a difference (in fact, it was often the only thing that could get me out of
bed after numerous 12 –hour workdays), I also understood the complexity of inter-
organizational politics and the challenges executives face in managing a diverse set of
stakeholders both inside and outside the organization.
One thing that has surprised me, however, is that while advocacy organizations have
been studied by many different disciplines, these groups and their executives are still not well

2

understood. Broadly speaking, different disciplines have approached advocacy in different
ways: political scientists have engaged in the study of interest groups; collective action
scholars have approached the challenges of common-pool resource problems; and nonprofit
scholars have engaged in studying the sector as a whole, but advocacy peripherally. All of
these disciplines recognize the central role that these organizations play in the American
political and policymaking processes, but nonprofit advocacy organizations themselves are
rarely studied. In addition, the diversity of approaches on organizations and advocacy leaves
many questions unanswered. Scholars have rarely peered inside nonprofit advocacy
organizations to understand not only how they work, but also haven’t sought to measure the
influence that their executives have on guiding the organization. Considering that policy and
political entrepreneurs are crucial to the policymaking process (Kingdon 2003; Mintrom and
Norman 2009), and that social movements or other collective groups often can’t maintain
their efficacy without strong leadership (Chong 1991; Moe 1988; Walker 1991), it is
surprising that these executives have yet to be studied in and of themselves.
The purpose of this study, therefore, is to develop a better understanding of the role of
executives in the strategic decision making of nonprofit advocacy organizations. I ask, “How
do the values and preferences of executives in nonprofit organizations affect their
organization’s strategies and tactics?” In the following chapters, I seek to provide a bridge to
the distinct literatures by leveraging a new conceptualization of these executives in theory,
followed by both qualitative and empirical evidence that supports this new approach. I
believe this work makes both a theoretical as well as empirical contribution to the study of
nonprofit political leadership. And, in doing so, the findings suggest that leadership matters,
and matters a great deal in nonprofit advocacy organizations.

3

Definitions and Terms
Nonprofit organizations are active across the American social, political, spiritual and
service landscapes. According to the Urban Institute (Blackwood, Roeger, and Pettijohn
2012), in 2010 there were an estimated 2.3 million nonprofits active in the United States, with
over 1.6 million of those formally registered with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
Although nonprofit organizations are distinct from other organizational forms due to the fact
that they generally don’t have to pay income taxes on revenue and are unable to distribute
profits to owners, they still have a significant economic impact. In just one year (in 2010),
they reported revenues of over $2 trillion, accounting for approximately 5.5% of GDP, and
accounted for 9.2% of the wages paid in the U.S (Blackwood, Roeger, and Pettijohn 2012).
In order to classify the many different types of organizations and their activities, the
IRS uses over 30 different “501” tax-exempt classifications. Charitable organizations,
including the arts, health care and education among others, are classified as 501(c)(3)
organizations and make up the largest set of organizations in the country. Another group,
called “social welfare” organizations, is classified as 501(c)(4) organizations. The IRS
(2014) defines these groups as “Civic leagues or organizations not organized for profit but
operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare.” While this category includes many
mutual benefit groups, such as employee organizations, volunteer fire departments or sports
clubs, it also includes a wide range of advocacy and civic organizations involved in policy
change as a primary activity, such as environmental organizations, animal rights groups, or
local community organizations working towards various civic ordinances. One leading
difference between this group of nonprofit organizations and charitable groups is while they
are tax-exempt, contributions to them are not tax-deductible. On the other hand, they are

4

allowed to engage in unlimited lobbying activities and electoral work to a limited extent,
something that is constrained for charitable groups. As of December, 2013, there were
81,686 social welfare groups registered with the IRS with reported revenues of $79.89
billion; in California there were 6,645 organizations with reported revenues of $7.87 billion
(NCCS 2014b).
Drawing from this subset of organizations, I define nonprofit advocacy organizations
as formal nonprofit organizations whose primary mission is policy change and primary
activity is advocacy at the local, state and national levels. Advocacy is a broadly defined
term used to describe the types of tactics that organizations may use to influence
policymakers. Advocacy tactics range from grassroots efforts, such as petition gathering,
rallies or protests, what Kollman (1998) calls “outside lobbying”, to face-to-face lobbying of
elected officials, called “inside lobbying”. Advocacy may also include corporate boycotts or
litigation. In other words, participating in advocacy is the use of one or more tactics in order
to press a cause, and this study uses a typology of insider and outsider tactics consistent with
Kollman’s to describe an organization’s activities.
Nonprofit advocacy organizations can be considered distinct from other organizations
because of “the centrality of principled beliefs or values in motivating their formations”
(Keck and Sikkink 1998, 1), and are important to the political process because they are
“organizations of influence outside of the state” (Nicholson-Crotty 2011, 61; DiMaggio and
Anheier 1990). In this way, they provide a bridge between citizens and policymakers. They
are also distinct from other nonprofit organizations because their advocacy mission is their
primary organizing tactic. Although they sometimes also provide direct services to the
public, they often recruit members and donors through their promise of social or policy
change. Individuals invest money and time in these groups because their values and political

5

ideology are aligned with those of the organization (see Chong 1991; Prakash and Gugerty
2011).
The unit of analysis for this study is the executive of nonprofit advocacy
organizations, defined as those who lead 501(c)(4) organizations in California. These
executives, called policy or political entrepreneurs (Kingdon 2003; Mintrom and Norman
2009), social entrepreneurs (Anheier 2005), or social movement executives, hold a unique
place in the both the theory and mythology of social change in the United States and
elsewhere. Yet, an understanding of how these executives navigate their organizational and
political environments is not well understood. They are often volunteers who have been
selected by the organization’s Board of Directors to be the organization’s president, chair or
spokesperson. They may also be a paid Executive Director or CEO. All of them, however,
contribute significant amounts of time, and sometimes their own money, to advance the
organization’s mission. What is not understood well is how their preferences and values
affect the strategic choices of their organizations. Additionally, while the literature does
embrace the idea of entrepreneurial executives as crucial to group formation and maintenance
(Chong 1991; Moe 1988; Kingdon 2003; Wilson 1995; Young 2011), it rarely focuses on
how and why group executives strategically manage their organization (Campbell 2005). In
other words, the executives of nonprofit advocacy organizations should be considered
political elites who have a very important place in the political arena. This study evaluates
the role of the executive as the individual who has direct day-to-day authority over the
internal decision-making of the organization.
Theoretical Framework
Nonprofit executives should be placed alongside other parties involved in the
policymaking process, including elected officials, other interest groups, voters and the media.

6

Due to the important role their organizations have in politics, they deserve to be better
understood through the development of theories which can be tested empirically. In this
study I offer a new conceptualization of these leaders and their role in guiding their
organizations. While executives undoubtedly have their own opinions on what is best for the
group, they also have a wide set of internal and external stakeholders that they must pay
attention to. How does the executive navigate these diverse interests?
To answer this question, I offer a new way to think about executive leadership
drawing on positive political theories (Riker and Ordersnook 1972), which applies the
methodological approaches to politics that have been used in the physical sciences and
economics, and the intuition offered by agency theory (Eisenhardt 1989; Jensen and
Meckling 1976). Agency theory is a class of models that seeks to explain the incentives and
constraints available to actors in an informal or formal contractual arrangement, also called
principal-agent problems. Although developed in the context of the firm, where the
relationship is usually defined as one between supervisors (principals) and subordinates
(agents), or between the Board of Directors and the CEO, agency theory has also been
extended to politics and political processes (see, for example, Dixit 1998; Grossman and
Helpman 2002; Ainsworth 1993; Ainsworth and Sened 1993; Bertelli 2012; Bertelli and
Smith 2010). However, in all models, each party in a principal-agent relationship is assumed
to be acting in their own self-interest to maximize their own personal utility, which leads to
problems of information asymmetries, including hidden action and hidden information.
One of the many models of agency theory, common agency (Bernheim and
Whinston 1986) models the relationship between one agent and multiple principals. In the
political arena the agreement between principals and the agent can certainly be formal,
explicit contracts such as an employment contract. But, they are just as likely to be more

7

implicit, such as the political power that is promised or traded between political parties and
members of Congress. Similarly, in the context of nonprofit advocacy organizations, the
executive can be considered the common agent of the wide variety of organizations and
individuals that they must contend with, including the organization’s Board of Directors
(required by law as an oversight body), donors and volunteers, and significantly for this
effort, policymakers. In the environments typified by common agency, different principals
each form an agreement with their agent. They likely recognize the existence of other
principals, but remain uncoordinated and are often in conflict with each other. Common
agency, then, is a “multilateral relationship in which several principals simultaneously try to
influence the actions of an agent” (Dixit, Grossman, and Helpman 1997). It is in the space
between these competing principals that the executive finds room to maneuver, and all things
being equal, they will maneuver their organizations in ways that increases their own utility
(Gailmard 2009).
To be sure there is some intuitive overlap between common agency and Stakeholder
Theory (Donaldson and Preston 1995; Freeman 1984). The latter argues that “Stakeholders
are persons or groups with legitimate interests in procedural and/or substantive aspects of
corporate activity” (Donaldson and Preston 1995, 67). Nonprofit organizations can certainly
be seen as having multiple stakeholders. However, common agency recognizes that agents
are not only concerned with the interests of various stakeholders, but are concerned about
maximizing their own utility. Thus, while elected officials may be concerned about the
expectations of their constituents, party members, the President and the courts, for example,
they are also keenly aware of their own chances at re-election and professional advancement.
In the nonprofit context, executives may be concerned about an organization’s stakeholders,
such as their Boards of Directors, elected officials, the media, their donors and members, and
other coalition partners. But, they are also focused on maintaining their own credibility,

8

reputation and personal or professional opportunities. Simply put, they may seek ways in
which to design their organization in their own image. The result is that these often
conflicting interests can have unexpected implications for an organization’s behavior.
Studying California
California is a state of contrasts, and as such provides an excellent setting for a study
on nonprofit advocacy organizations and their leaders. The state is a leader on policy issues
and has powerful institutions allowing for direct citizen democracy, but it is often considered
to be ungovernable due to its large and diverse – both ethnically, and politically-- population,
and constitutional rules that make real reform difficult. Nonprofit executives are tasked with
navigating these obstacles in order to meet their organization’s goals, which can make
working in California exceedingly expensive and almost untenable. Yet, there are still
thousands of organizations across the state working at the local or state level, and some of
them are incredibly influential despite these challenges. These executives do so because
having an influence in California means not only implementing policy that will have an effect
on tens of millions of people, but they can also set the stage for similar policies elsewhere.
In 2013, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated the California population to be over 38
million, and in March, 2014, the Latino population of the state overtook Caucasians as the
largest single ethnic group with 39% (Gutierrez 2014). In fact, the Latino population is
expected to become the outright majority by 2040 (van Vechten 2014). The economic
impact of the state is also unparalleled in the world economy, ranking 9
th
, just behind Italy
and just ahead of Russia in 2012, with an estimated $2 trillion in economic activity (Capitol
Alert 2012).
Politically, California’s legislature is held by a strong majority of Democrats, and
since 2011, it has had a Democratic Governor in Jerry Brown after two terms by Republican

9

Arnold Schwarzenegger. Following the 2012 elections, the California Senate was made up of
a supermajority of Democrats, with the State Assembly following closely behind. Despite
the fact that Democrats are largely in control of the state legislative agenda, the state
legislature has become more polarized over recent decades, with few Republicans willing to
cross the aisle and vote with Democrats on issues, particularly in creating the 2/3 majority
necessary to pass the annual budget bill (until 2010) (Marois 2010) and for tax increases
(Masket 2007). In addition, while the state is largely Democratic in its politics, the parties
themselves have a weak grip on the state legislature and the executive branch, and even less
control over voters (van Vechten 2014). No single party has a majority among California
voters. In 2012, registered Republicans fell to under 30% for the first time in the state’s
history, while Democrats have held steady over the past several years at 44%. California also
has a large, and growing, number of those who decline to state a party, at 21% (Dreier 2012),
and this group is the only one that has grown in proportion over the past several years.
California has long led the nation in innovation in both the political and economic spheres.
Not only the home to Silicon Valley, California has also been a leader in government reform
efforts (including an initiative process), climate change and other environmental protection
policies, such as vehicle emission standards (van Vechten 2014). And while a few California
localities, like San Francisco, were among the first in the country to add sexual orientation to
their nondiscrimination ordinances (Foreman 1997), voters also supported the anti-gay
Proposition 8 in 2008, which prohibited same-sex marriage until it was overturned by the
U.S. Supreme Court in 2013 (Schwartz 2013).
California is also one of 24 states that have an initiative process, allowing individuals
and groups to place legislative initiatives directly on the ballot subject to popular vote.
Installed during the Progressive era at the turn of the 20
th
century, the voter initiative process
was designed to allow citizens to wrest control back from corrupt and ineffective politicians

10

who were perceived as being in the pocket of the robber-barons of the age (van Vechten
2014). Taking issues directly to the ballot, the state has undergone several voter revolts on
issues that have been designed to control the power of government over the population
(Baldassare 2013). For example, in 1978, voter approved Proposition 13 which required that
a 2/3 majority in both houses of the state legislature be won in order to raise taxes, as well as
cap the growth of property taxes. This limited the legislature’s ability to tap into new
revenue streams (Cummins 2012). California was also one of the first states to impose term
limits on its legislators through the initiative process, which some have argued has resulted in
less institutional memory among members of the legislature and lead to a short-term view of
political issues, including the annual budget (Cummins 2012). A recent survey (Baldassare
2013) found that a majority of Californians believe that citizens are probably better at making
decisions on legislation than the government and state legislators. However, the initiative
process has also been criticized as part of the problem of California’s political polarization
and dysfunction. While a majority of Californians are generally supportive of the initiative
process, many believe that the initiative process is controlled a lot (55%) or some (35%) by
special interests (Baldassare 2013), and that the initiative process is controlled more by
moneyed interests than voters themselves (Broder 2001).
Counterintuitively, despite this strong tradition of voter-led legislation, Californians
show a lower propensity to get involved in civic engagement activities than their peers
around the rest of the country. Defined as either political or social civic engagement, Prieger
and Ellis (2013) argue that an individual’s engagement is largely determined by
socioeconomic factors including citizenship status, household income and educational
attainment. Considering the large number of immigrants living in California, and the fact that
a large number of residents lack a high school diploma, this is not surprising. However, this
fact has ripple effects through participation rates in political activities, including discussing

11

politics with friends and family, or engaging in economic activity that supports causes
important to them (including boycotts). Indeed, Ramakrishnan and Baldassare (2004) find
that some groups, including Latinos, Asian-Americans and African-Americans, are much less
represented in political processes than other groups. As they write (2004, viii), “Whites are
overrepresented in California in almost every political activity, particularly when it comes to
contributing money to political campaigns and writing to elected officials. Thus, the option of
participating in political activities other than voting actually tends to reinforce the dominance
of whites at the ballot box.”
Additionally, voter approved term limits for legislators led to significant turnover in
the makeup of the legislature every two years. The Senate, which has four year terms, has
half of their 40 members up for election every two years, while in the 80 member Assembly,
the entire body is up for election every two years. Prior to 2012, legislators were limited to
serving three terms in the Assembly, and two terms in the Senate. Some years, term limits
has resulted in turnover at close to 50% from legislative session to session, and some scholars
have argued that this turnover has limited institutional knowledge as new members struggle
to learn the legislative process, and the intricacies of a very large state government (van
Vechten 2014). In this environment, senators, which by rule develop more institutional
memory, and their more experienced staffs often consider themselves the “watchdog” of the
“more turnover-prone Assembly” (van Vechten 2014, 48).
California, thus, offers a fascinating laboratory in which to study activism and
advocacy. With a government controlled by a single party, and large swaths of the
population under-represented in the political process, it is nevertheless incredibly polarized.
With a long tradition of direct democracy in the state, many of its residents, including those
among the fastest growing populations, also struggle to find a place in the political process.

12

In this environment, leaders would be expected to struggle mightily to have an impact, and
many do, but everyone knows what the stakes are: what happens in California doesn’t stay in
California. Make a difference in the Golden State, and your policies may be replicated
elsewhere. Many nonprofit executives accept this challenge, and embrace the idea of social
change, writ large.
Chapter Overview
This introduction describes the setting for the types of organizations and executives
active in the chaotic, diverse and difficult California political landscape. In the chapters that
follow, I further explore nonprofit advocacy organizations and executives through the
literatures of interest groups, nonprofit organizations and leadership. The interest group
literature has made great strides over the past few decades in describing the role that diverse
interests have in the policymaking process. These studies describe the ways in which
politics, and policymaking, is a push-and-pull between many players driven by the cost of
information, as well as political credibility and support. However, nonprofit organizations
are a unique organization form that is different from how interest groups are generally
defined. These differences may lead to different obstacles and opportunities than other types
of organizations. I also discuss the role of the executive in guiding their organization,
tracing the study of entrepreneurship from the private firm and social enterprises to politics
and policymaking. Once this foundation is provided, Chapter 3 provides a new way to think
about nonprofit advocacy organizations and their leaders, and develops several testable
hypotheses on the behavior of nonprofit executives based on individual, environmental and
structural characteristics, paying close attention to the ways in which nonprofit executives
engage with their various stakeholders and make decisions. The theoretical framework is
then evaluated with evidence provided by nonprofit executives that were interviewed across
the state of California in Chapter 4. These case illustrations also provide some context to the

13

type of organization under study, and those that lead them. This chapter is followed by
Chapters 5-8, which provides empirical results from a statewide survey of those that lead
nonprofit organizations. Many of these groups engage in advocacy, although some do not,
and the data provides an opportunity to explore these differences.
Findings from both the executive interviews and empirical data generated from a
statewide survey of nonprofit organizations suggest the executive matters, and matters a great
deal to the strategic and tactical decisions of the organization. The interviews demonstrate
the wide discretion and autonomy nonprofit executives have in guiding their organizations,
and the way they make decisions. In addition, the empirical findings suggest that an
executive’s ideological distance from key members of the California legislature have
implications for how the executive sees the role of the group, as well as the activities and
structural choices made by the organization. While this study is just a first step in a research
agenda exploring the implications of leadership and nonprofit organizations in the
policymaking process, it offers a first-of-its kind glimpse into the inner workings of the
leader as they seek policy and social change.
Conclusion
Many, if not a majority, of Americans support nonprofit advocacy organizations that
are consistent with their own personal beliefs. They support these groups financially, by
donating their time, reading their newsletters, contacting their legislators when asked to do
so, or even just “liking” them on Facebook to receive news and updates about issues they are
about. Obviously, these organizations are important to American politics. Their executives
perhaps more so, as they marshal often limited resources in order to advance their cause.
Unfortunately, these individuals have not been studied by the existing literature,
leaving a large gap in understanding the role that these executives – many of them volunteers

14

– have in guiding their organizations and sometimes having a great impact on the American
political process. This study addresses these gaps by offering a study of these organizations
and their executives, and in doing so, offers a first-of-its kind glimpse into the inner workings
of these organizations. Ultimately, this study finds that nonprofit executives have a
significant amount of discretion, autonomy and thus, control, over their organizations as they
navigate a complex political environment.

15

CHAPTER 2: ORGANIZATIONS, ADVOCACY AND LEADERSHIP

In January, 2012, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, a nonprofit foundation supporting
breast-cancer research, prevention and education, came under fire when they opted to
eliminate grant funding to Planned Parenthood’s breast cancer screening and education
programs. Stating that the elimination of funding was due to federal investigations of
Planned Parenthood, another nonprofit organization, it quickly became apparent that the
move was made because of internal Komen opposition to Planned Parenthood’s other
services, particularly abortion, that they offered to its predominantly low-income clients
(Belluck 2012). However, instead of accepting the decline in grant funding, Planned
Parenthood’s advocacy arm, Planned Parenthood Action Fund (PPFA), immediately engaged
in a very public campaign carried out on social media, in the mainstream press and among
members of Congress. Calling on their hundreds of thousands of activists to speak out to
Komen directly, the group also generated a letter to Komen opposing the decision that was
signed by 26 U.S. Senators within 48 hours. Responding to this call to action, PPFA was
able raise $8 million from their supporters in just four days (far exceeding the $700,000 in
grant funding they were going to lose) (Yarrow 2012), and the organization was able to apply
so much pressure on Komen that the foundation reversed its decision. Komen, on the other
hand, saw a precipitous drop in their own funding, showing a year-over-year decline by $77
million in 2013, representing a 20% decline in their income (Hiltzik 2014). PPFA followed
this victory with a “social movement camp on wheels” during the 2012 elections, touring
electoral swing states in a large pink bus and mobilizing voters and organizing other citizen
actions (Yarrow 2012).

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Planned Parenthood Action Fund represents the type of organization that this study
seeks to better understand: a subset of political and nonprofit organizations falling under what
political scientists call interest groups. As a nonprofit advocacy organization that seeks to
create social and policy change at all levels of government, PPFA leverages political support
from their hundreds of thousands of members and activists and applies that political support
to the causes of reproductive choice and women’s health. The result is that they are seen as
one of the leading organizations representing pro-choice voters in the country, an
organization that both the public and politicians pay attention to.
Groups like PPFA have been at the heart of American political life since the nation
was founded. Early observations made by James Madison (1787), who worried about the
influence of “factions” in politics, and Tocqueville (1835) who commented on American zeal
in forming voluntary associations to press their cause, place citizen organizations in the
nation’s political processes. Over time, many of these organizations formalized as nonprofit
corporations (Hall 2006). Today, one type of nonprofit organization – the nonprofit
advocacy group – works to implement policy or social change at the local, state or national
level, and the executives of these groups have a crucial role in guiding their groups as they
seek to meet their organization’s mission.
While the study of organizations and advocacy has a wide number of approaches and
theories, it is necessary to narrow the focus to the theoretical perspectives that best describe
the inner-workings of these organizations, the strategic decisions made by their leaders and
their role in the political process. A positive political theory of interest groups, which is a
variant of rational choice theory, provides the necessary theoretical foundation for this
approach. Positive political theory (Riker and Ordersnook 1972) seeks to use the tools of the
physical sciences and economics as a foundation to methodically develop theories that can be

17

empirically tested. It also importantly “looks to individual decision-making as a source of
collective political outcomes” (Amadae and Bueno de Mesquita 1999, 269). That is, it
assumes self-interest among all parties involved the political process and recognizes the
important role individuals have in driving group outcomes. Using this approach as the
foundation for the study of nonprofit advocacy organizations, this chapter traces the research
on nonprofit organizations and advocacy, and discusses how the role of group leaders can be
framed as one of entrepreneurship.
A Positive Theory of Interest Groups
In their book The Interest Group Society, Berry and Wilcox (2009, 5) define interest
groups as “organizations that try to influence government policy through lobbying or
electoral activity, regardless of whether they have members.” These groups represent their
constituents (members or other organizations) before decision-makers. They also seek to
educate the public and legislators about issues, monitor the issues as they are implemented,
and seek to frame, or control, the way issues are discussed in the public sphere (Berry and
Wilcox 2009).
One way to conceptualize the role of interest groups in politics is to imagine the push
and pull between all the political actors, including interest groups, legislators, public agencies
and the courts, in a political arena, and the study of these groups can trace itself back to the
“pluralist school” of politics, which emerged in the 1950s. These early scholars attempted to
describe and evaluate the wide range of interests active in the political process. Truman
(1951) argues that interest groups form due to disturbances in the economic or social
environment, such as an economic crisis or recession, technological change or unpopular
policies. He suggested that the political process is made up of a large, diverse set of interest
groups as political actors engaged in, and influencing, government (and hence, the pluralist

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approach). Once active, then, these groups help to restore the social balance, which he called
the “societal equilibrium”, by providing these interests a level of power in the political
process. Dahl (1961), too, suggests that loose coalitions form on particular issues and
organizations representing specific interests that engage in bargaining with elected officials to
develop solutions. Through this logic, these scholars recognized that interest groups formed
because of an imbalance, or disruption, that only nongovernmental organizations could help
rectify. As Salisbury (1969, 5) writes, “A principal way of [re-balancing society] is by
organizing a formal association because, as Truman points out, this not only improves
bargaining power but it also helps to stabilize and strengthen relationships within the group
by increasing the mutually supportive interaction among members and thereby the range and
salience of their shared values.”
Political scientists have not abandoned the pluralist approach in the contemporary
literature as they continue to recognize the large number of organizations and interests that
permeate political processes here and abroad. However, contemporary scholars such as Moe
(1988), Wilson (1995), Kollman (1998), Grossman and Helpman (2002), Hansen (1985),
Ainsworth and Sened (1993) and even Olson (1965; 1984), among others, have expanded
upon the pluralist approach. One primary contribution of the this recent literature is that the
“disturbance theory” used by Truman has generally been advanced using the tools provided
by the approaches of agency theory and transaction cost economics (Coase, 1937;
Williamson, 1988, 2010).
While agency theory was originally developed to understand the inherent imbalances
of information, including hidden action and hidden information, between owners of private
firms (the “principals”) and managers (the “agents”) (Jensen and Meckling 1976), it has been
expanded to include many forms of contractual relationships, control and authority that guide

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the behavior of individuals and organizations (Fama and Jensen 1983; Hill and Jones 1992).
The role of transaction costs (Coase 1937; Williamson 1988; 2010), on the other hand,
measures the costs of “valuable attributes of what is being exchanged and the costs of
protecting rights and policing and enforcing agreements” (North 1990, 17) and has important
implications to understanding the costs associated with the inherent information asymmetries
among all forms of contracts, including government and political contracts or contracts
between nonprofit executives and their stakeholders.
For example, in Mancur Olson’s classic work The Logic of Collective Action (1965),
he argues that individuals will not engage in the provision of public goods unless the benefits
they receive from such action outweigh the cost of participating. In other words, the costs of
participating outweigh the benefit of the good being sought. In this way, it is difficult for
organizations to form, which is particularly true for large organizations as the benefits that
can accrue back to members is much more diffuse. Here a rational individual will let others
do the work for them rather than participate while still enjoying the public good provided by
others, also called free-riding. Ultimately, in this scenario, no individual will participate and
therefore no public goods will be provided. Hansen (1985) builds on this logic, arguing that
other factors, including personal preferences, can lead to interest group formation. He argues
that changing personal circumstances, including preferences, needs, resources, insecurity, and
information should be taken into consideration alongside the actual benefits offered by the
organization. Testing his model empirically, he finds that groups will form, but may only
organize when there are perceived threats, perhaps supporting Truman’s “disturbances”
theory. Moe (1988), too, suggests that group formation relies upon other variables outside of
pure self-interest. Salisbury (1969) argues that if supporters don’t feel that they are receiving
the promised benefits, they exit the organization.

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Organizations, thus, contract with donors and supporters by promising a set of
benefits or incentives for them to join – whether that’s solidary (social), material (i.e.
financial) or purposive (ideological) (Clark and Wilson 1961). Policy change can be one
such purposive benefit, but Chong (1991) postulates that when the distance between public
(member) preferences and actual policy is small, individuals lose their incentive to continue
to participate in the organization, since the gains made by any further changes are not worth
the effort expended to achieve them. In other words, the public demand for change weakens
when victories are won, or the formulated policy articulated by the executive is not effective
in mobilizing additional support (or as Schattschneider (1960) contends, it fails to “expand
the conflict”). In this scenario, organizations will shrink in support or ultimately fail.
Drawing from the transaction costs literature of Coase (1937) and Williamson (2010;
1988), Dixit’s (1998) theoretical approach suggests that “transaction cost politics” is where
the promise of a specific policy is the contract between elected officials and the interest
groups or voters. The costs associated with this political exchange are the significant
information costs borne by all parties to understand the issues, selecting the optimal policy
among alternatives, and understand each other’s true preferences. While elected officials
may be seeking to maximize the number of votes that they earn in the next election (Shepsle
and Bonchek 1997; Downs 1957), interest groups may be seen as interested in maximizing
their policy preferences. They do this by increasing their political clout and credibility by
either expanding their resources or developing and leveraging information sought by either
constituents or elected officials.
This literature has also engaged to some degree with the mediating effect between an
organization’s members and decision makers, most notably legislatures. For example,
Grossman and Helpman (2002) develop a model to analyze the relationship between voters,

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interest groups and politicians. They assume that all parties act in their own self-interest and
groups can use their superior knowledge of the policy environment in lobbying campaigns.
Ainsworth and Sened (1993) model the “two audiences” of voters and elected officials. Their
model mediates between Congress and voters, where the presence of the lobbyist can signal
to both audiences that the group is politically viable. They also provide valuable information
to Congress on demands for public goods, and provide important (and expensive) information
to their members regarding public policies. Other literature suggests that groups seek to both
signal support of specific issues to policymakers as well as seek to expand the conflict by
recruiting new members at the grassroots (Kollman 1998).
While these scholars have made great strides in understanding why and how interest
groups engage in the advocacy process, there are three main challenges facing this line of
inquiry. The first is that this line of scholarship does not focus on nonprofit advocacy
organizations specifically, but includes nonprofit organizations with other types of
organizations – such as corporate, state or national interests. Second, the interest group
literature rarely discusses the role of leadership in the process. Instead, it deals with the
organizations as the unit of analysis, acting with one collective voice. This problem will be
addressed later in this chapter. Finally, these scholars don’t generally try to peer inside these
organizations to study the internal and strategic decision-making that these groups struggle
with on a day-to-day basis. This question, too, will be addressed in the chapters to come.
Ideology and Politics
While interest group scholars tend to ignore the internal decision-making of the
groups they study, one limited way that they do approach these organizations is to better
understand how they decide which issues to weigh in on, or get involved with. Other
scholars have tried to understand where specific political actors, such as members of

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Congress, agency secretaries or the President, stand on issues in the political arena. They’ve
recognized that the ideology of an organization or individual is an important factor leading to
specific behavioral, and thus political, outcomes. For example, it makes a lot of intuitive
sense for a liberal politician to have political opinions and preferred policies that are quite
distinct from a conservative politician. Most would expect politicians to vote on issues that
best align with their own personal preferences, all else being equal. In other words, political
ideology is seen as driving much of what happens in politics.
But what is political ideology, and how can it be measured? Sure, it is possible to see
where political actors stand on any given issue, like gun control or abortion rights, but what is
the overall underlying ideology that drives their political decisions? Lane (1962, 11) suggests
that political ideology is formed by “the nature of life in a society, by the generalizations
made from everyday experience, by the cultural premises, the widely shared personal
qualities of the population, and by society’s current and historic social conflicts.” Held deep
within, an individual’s political ideology can be considered a latent (or hard to observe)
construct that “helps to interpret the social world… Specific ideologies crystallize and
communicate the widely (but not unanimously) shared beliefs, opinions, and values of an
identifiable group, class constituency or society” (Jost, Federico, and Napier 2009, 309).
Social scientists have generally characterized political ideology as being on a left-
right continuum from liberal to conservative (Jost, Federico, and Napier 2009), where the left
end of the spectrum is defined as the liberal space and is often associated with advocating
social change and rejecting inequality, and conservatives, at the right end, are characterized
as rejecting social change and accepting inequality (Jost et al. 2003a; Jost et al. 2003b). To
visualize where a politician, or other political actor stands, most scholars use a single left-
right spectrum, understanding that political elites seek to use a single dimension of ideology

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in order to clearly articulate their positions in a way that can appeal easily to voters (Poole
and Rosenthal 1997; Poole 2005). Using a single dimension theoretically to explain political
behavior descends from spatial voting models initially developed by Hotelling (1929) and
Downs (1957). Downs, particularly, argues that voters were distributed along a spectrum
from left to right and that voters will cast their ballot for the candidate that is closest to them
along that spectrum. The position of the voter, and the politician, in this space is often their
ideal point. Their ideal point, and each additional point, in the spatial model represent utility
for the voter. The farther away the voter is from the politician, the less utility the voter
receives if they vote for them. The result is that as politicians compete for votes, the
politicians tend to converge on the median voter in order to provide the most utility to the
highest number of voters (Poole 2005; Bertelli 2012) and win the election. In the legislative
setting, politicians and interests are along a similar dimension with each other, and they are
competing not for voters, but for floor (or roll-call) votes on specific pieces of legislation. In
this model, the median member in each body of the legislature is where interests tend to
converge, and these votes are based on their latent ideology, which can be measured.
Krehbiel (2010; 1996) expands this model by pointing out that the member of a
legislature that creates the super-majority (often necessary to over-ride vetoes) is also a
crucial elected official that interests will congeal around. External organizations, such as
interest groups or public agencies, will also be concerned about these “pivotal” officials
because they want to see their policy initiatives succeed. This is particularly the case in
divided government, but can even be seen in a unified government (Krehbiel 1996), where
the same political party holds the two primary branches of government, the president or
governor and both houses of the legislature. Institutional rules requiring a two-thirds
majority to over-ride a veto, or, as in the case of California, pass a tax increase, make these

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members, or super-majority members, crucial to all interests seeking to implement their
preferred policy initiatives.
The predominant method of measuring where members of Congress, bureaucrats and
interest groups fall along this left-right dimension is called ideal point estimation. Ideal point
estimation is a powerful tool that can be used to visualize the placement of political actors in
a policy space. It can also help to better understand why decision-makers make the decisions
that they do, and is helpful in testing theories of political behavior (Clinton, Jackman, and
Rivers 2004). Developed by Poole and Rosenthal (1997; 1997) and Clinton, Jackman and
Rivers (2004), among others, it was first used to measure members of Congress through the
use of roll-call votes. Estimating the distribution of legislators along the policy space can
help to identify partisan differences among the branches of government (Clinton et al. 2012)
or party discipline among legislators, for example (McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal 2001). It
can also be used to understand how ideology may affect policy outcomes across the types of
organizations involved in the political process. Bertelli and Grose (2006), for example, apply
ideal point estimation to better understand the politics underscoring the 1999 Senate
impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton. Their approach in measuring the ideal points of
the Senators along a “removal” space proved incredibly successful in predicting the outcome.
On the perjury charge, their estimates were 97% accurate in predicting the votes of Senators,
while on the obstruction of justice charge, they were 99% accurate. Other political groups
have also been under scrutiny. Martin and Quinn (2002) apply ideal point estimation to a
study of judicial behavior at the U.S. Supreme Court, Shor and McCarty (2011) study the
ideology of American state legislatures, and Bertelli and Grose (2009) have measured the
ideology of U.S. cabinet secretaries and the impact that their ideology had on the distribution
of grant funding under their authority. The ideology of voters, too, is compared with their
representatives (Bafumi and Herron 2010).

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Measuring ideology for members of Congress, or other legislatures, has generally
used their roll-call votes. For organizations, however, researchers have used the
organizations’ stated positions on legislation, treating those positions as if they were actual
votes (Poole and Rosenthal 1997, 2007; McKay 2010). For example, if the National Rifle
Association states public opposition to a particular vote in the U.S. Senate, that position
would be treated as a “no” vote. This approach allows for an opportunity to compare the
ideology of organizations directly with the legislators that they often are trying to influence.
Using this method, Poole and Rosenthal (2007; 1997) find that interest groups’ stated
positions are correlated with members of Congress and found that interest groups are, on
average, more extreme than Congress. McKay (2010; 2008) uses the same methodology to
estimate the ideal points of 72 interest groups. With this data set, she showed that more
extreme groups were less likely to lobby than make campaign contributions, and that those
groups more ideologically close to Congress were more likely to have increased expenditures
on lobbying (McKay 2010). Bonica (2013) uses contribution data to and for candidates by
political action committees (PACs) to estimate the ideal points of both. He finds that PAC
ideology is “unimodal and centered between the parties” (Bonica 2013, 2), which contradicts
Poole and Rosenthal’s findings that interest groups are on the extreme end of the ideological
spectrum and are polarizing factors in politics.
Research findings have also supported the proposition that an individual’s ideology
influences policy, and many studies measuring the effect of ideology on policy outcomes
demonstrates that, indeed, ideology affects behavior of political actors. However, thus far
when scholars have evaluated interest groups in this context, the individuals inside the
organizations haven’t been considered, only the organization’s stated official positions. In
addition, the literature does not usually differentiate between the various types of
organizational forms that groups may be bound by, such as for-profit firms, government

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agencies or non-profit organizations. The interest group literature, for example, rarely
discusses whether or not the organizations under scrutiny are for-profit firms serving narrow
financial interests, such as lobbying for the oil industry, or whether they are non-profit
organizations that may be pursuing broad goals such as winning regulations on air pollution.
This is a crucial distinction that is discussed in the following section.
Nonprofit Advocacy Organizations: Definition and Distinction
What has been missing thus far from this story of politics, politicians, organizations
and leaders is the role of nonprofit organizations in this context. In other words, it’s
important to return to the story of Planned Parenthood Action Fund and understand what role
they provide in American politics, and why the nonprofit advocacy organization is a discrete
organizational form that has opportunities and constraints that differ from other participants
in the political process. The nonprofit groups that engage in activism and advocacy are often
called advocacy organizations, civic engagement organizations or interest groups –
depending on the academic discipline. Nonprofit advocacy organizations not only mobilize
around specific issues, but they are recognized as crucial participants in a healthy democracy
(Prakash and Gugerty 2011; Berry 1993).
This study defines nonprofit advocacy groups as formal nonprofit organizations
whose primary mission is policy change and primary activity is advocacy at the local, state
and national levels. This definition excludes organizations whose sole purpose is to elect
candidates to office (such as political parties), government agencies, as well as other
nonprofit organizations where advocacy is only a secondary activity in support of a service or
social mission. “Advocacy” can be considered both formal lobbying efforts aimed at
decision makers, as well as grassroots lobbying and organizing, public education on policy
issues or corporate boycotts and litigation. For example, as was discussed at the beginning of

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this chapter, nonprofit advocacy organizations can engage in a social media strategy to
encourage supporters to protest, or support, a particular action by another organization –
whether that’s government, or another private organization. They also can educate and
mobilize voters to engage in elections, and to a limited degree, support candidates for office
(although this might be changing due to recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions). What they
generally don’t do is engage directly in electoral efforts, such as recruiting candidates or
running electoral campaigns for candidates running for office. That task is left to the political
parties.
While many nonprofit organizations provide needed public goods such as health care
and community services, they can also provide a mechanism for individuals to engage
collectively in the political process (Berry and Wilcox, 2009; Boris and Mosher-Williams,
1998; Child and Gronbjerg, 2007; Verba, Schlozman, and Brady, 1995). That is, like all
interest groups, they represent their constituents before lawmakers (Berry and Wilcox 2009),
but nonprofit advocacy organizations are tax-exempt organizations that also have distinct
legal, tax and ownership structures. Many also have strong universal missions (such as
“clean air”) that make organizing difficult, which we have seen.
Role in Politics
Nonprofit advocacy groups specifically are important to the political process because
they are a third party that functions outside the structures of government (Nicholson-Crotty
2011, 61; DiMaggio and Anheier 1990). They are also not like other organizational forms,
such as private firms, because of their mission-driven attributes (Keck and Sikkink 1998, 1).
Through these organizations, individuals can build organizational skills and create networks
of trust and cohesion necessary to solve problems, and band together to articulate their
collective interests (Boris and Krehely, 2002; Olson, 1965; Ostrom, 1990). Groups also help

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reduce an individual’s cost of obtaining political information, and provide the benefit of
representing them and their policy preferences before decision makers by lobbying on their
behalf (M. Young 2011). In other words, people often support and participate in advocacy
organizations in order to represent their interests before decision-makers.
Like other interest groups, advocacy organizations also seek to educate their
constituents and the general public, are executives in agenda setting in the political process,
and help to monitor the implementation of government and private programs (Berry and
Wilcox 2009). Most nonprofit advocacy organizations distinguish themselves from for-profit
interest groups, such as industry lobby groups, by arguing “that they represent the collective
interests of the general public and underrepresented groups as opposed to the interests of
well-organized powerful groups, especially business, mainstream social institutions, and the
elite professions” (Jenkins 2006, 307), they also can include all “civic engagement” activities
designed to influence public opinion or the policymaking process (1998). This implies that
these organizations are outside the primary power structures of policymaking and
implementation, but that they represent an important bridge between the wider public and the
policymakers.
Narrow corporate interests, by contrast, provide (mostly financial or legal) benefits by
way of beneficial policy towards the industry, while an environmental group may only be
able to provide universal (or non-excludable) benefits, like clean air, or clean water, or new
parks. These types of benefits often typify the free-rider problem. Individuals can enjoy the
benefits of the new good if it is won (such as breathing cleaner air) regardless of their
participation in the effort to secure the good. Chong (1991) argues that group executives
must convince the potential membership that the good can only be won if it is jointly
produced. Therefore, it is only possible to win if everyone participates in winning it. Young

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(2011, 35), on the other hand, suggests that nonprofit advocacy groups “market collective
goods to potential buyers”. The distinctions between nonprofit organizations and other types
of groups would be expected to have an impact on their decision-making and strategic
choices.
Unfortunately, there is a dearth of formal theory on nonprofit advocacy organizations
specifically, including the constraints, challenges and opportunities that they face. Instead,
the definitions of the organizations engaged in advocacy are inconsistent at best, and as
mentioned above, often do not take into account important considerations of organization
form, boundaries and ownership (Andrews and Edwards 2004). Because of this, nonprofit
advocacy organizations are wedged in with other types of organizations that engage in
advocacy.
Ownership and Control
In addition, other differences between nonprofits and other organizational forms can
be quite stark, which is one of the reasons nonprofits are often studied independently from
other groups (see, for example, Weisbrod 1977; Hansmann 1987; 1980; Powell and Steinberg
2006). Since nonprofits have a “non-distribution constraint” (Hansmann 1987; 1980), they
are not able to provide members or directors with any financial benefits, also called residual
claims, directly. In addition, the legal status of nonprofit advocacy groups, depending on
their filing status with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), includes significant constraints on
allowable behavior for the organization. For example, nonprofit organizations that register as
a “social welfare” 501(c)(4) organization can spend unlimited amounts of money on
lobbying, but are not able to make campaign contributions directly to candidates unless they
form a separate political action committee and do independent fundraising for that

30

organization. For profit firms, however, can make unlimited (thanks to Citizens United)
campaign contributions to influence elections.
Finally, organizational theorist Aldrich (1971, 283) suggests organizational
boundaries, are a “crucial element that defines an organization” where organizations must
distinguish between members and non-members, and limit entry and exit from the group.
However, for nonprofit advocacy organizations, membership recruitment and member exit
are extremely fluid, particularly today with the growth of social media tools. Knoke (1990)
suggests that the requirement to join an organization may only require a gift of time or
money, but today individuals can join an organization with a single signature, and there are
usually no consequences to leaving. This is quite different from, say, a trade association
where members have to provide a significant financial commitment to participate. In some
associations, such as Bar Associations, individuals can’t exit the organization without
forfeiting their right to practice their trade, such as law. One can only imagine that the ability
to freely and easily join and exit organizations puts additional pressure on the executives of
nonprofit advocacy organizations who are tasked with recruiting and maintaining large
membership bases in order to demonstrate credibility and political clout.
Nonprofit advocacy organizations are also unique from other organizations due to the
fact that they do not pay income taxes on their revenue (Jenkins 2006). In the United States,
nonprofit organizations receive significant benefits from government by being able to operate
tax-free, which provides additional resources to the organization. However, purely political
nonprofits are not able to offer tax-deductible donations to their donors, unlike more
traditional charitable nonprofit organizations. This tax-deduction is a significant
consideration in the nonprofit literature on charitable giving, the economics of nonprofit
organizations, resource management and funding sources. For example, “political” advocacy

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nonprofits are generally not able to seek grant funding from private foundations, and are
usually prohibited from earning government support, grants or contracts. This has wide
implications on their relationship with elected officials and government agencies. While
many nonprofits who do receive these types of benefits (whether grants or contracts) to
provide specific services may feel pressure to limit lobbying or political action for fear of
losing their funding sources (Leroux and Goerdel 2009; Grønbjerg 1992; Grønbjerg 1991;
Ruggiano and Taliaferro 2012), nonprofit advocacy organizations do not have such
constraints. In fact, these groups are often quite proud of the fact that they are not beholden
to government interests. Because of these constraints, their hunt for resources to support
their efforts may have a different shape than other nonprofit groups.
Determinants of Advocacy
The determinants of advocacy in nonprofit organizations have been studied, although
this literature usually considers advocacy as a discreet task undertaken by an organization
that may have wider goals – such as service provision. Rarely are nonprofit advocacy groups
studied independently. In a recent article Smith and Pekkanen (2012) outline the ways in
which nonprofit organizations engage in advocacy. In a survey of nonprofit organizations in
Washington, DC and Seattle, WA they find that nonprofits are more likely to engage in
advocacy if they receive government funding (which contradicts earlier findings by scholars
such as Child and Gronbjerg (2007)), have access to adequate resources and available
capacity, and have mission statements that are supportive of advocacy. Here, the fact that
organizations rely upon their mission statements for direction in activities is important. As
they write, “[E]ven among non-profits with charitable goals, some organizations might
choose to eschew advocacy because they do not view it as a key part of their mission” (Smith
and Pekkanen 2012, 40). In other words, an organization’s mission – a decision made in its
past -- is seen as potentially constraining to advocacy activities. This is further supported by

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other theoretical and empirical findings. For example, Minkoff and Powell (2006, 592) argue
that an organization’s mission both “motivates activity and also limits the menu of possible
actions”. Auer, Twombley and De Vita (2011) also suggest that mission statements may
make nonprofit organizations less willing to adapt and more resistant to (necessary) change
than other forms of organizations. However, in the extant literature, the organization’s
ideology is not considered.
Other relevant recent research in the nonprofit sector also seeks to uncover the
determinants of advocacy by nonprofit organizations. Guo and Saxton (2010) find that
nonprofits were more likely to engage in advocacy if their board consisted of constituents and
those constituents were involved in strategic planning and decision-making. Using publicly
available data on reproductive health organizations, Nicholson-Crotty (2011) finds that the
political environment was a determinant of bureaucratic advocacy (over legislative
advocacy). She finds that the more conservative the legislature, the more likely the
organization is to engage in bureaucratic lobbying, while Nicholson-Crotty (2009) also
determines that nonprofits engage in a two-stage process in deciding whether or not to engage
in advocacy activities. The first stage is determining if the potential policy benefits are
sufficient to cover the cost of lobbying. That is, does the cost of engaging in lobbying
outweigh the benefits? Once this threshold is met, organizations then decide to choose which
tactics to use. In a study of California nonprofit organizations Suarez and Hwang (2008) find
that those organizations who identify as more mission-driven were more likely to lobby than
those that were not, indicating that intensity or identification with the mission may have an
impact on the choice of whether or not to engage in advocacy.
While helpful in understanding nonprofit organizations and their advocacy activities,
this literature fails to engage with advocacy in the way I propose to do in this study. The

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nonprofit literature has not only rarely engaged with advocacy organizations specifically, and
how they are differentiated from the charitable nonprofit sector, but it fails to look beyond
advocacy as a simple task undertaken along with many others. Instead, since these
organizations are so important to the political process, and even to democracy itself, a more
detailed study is called for which seeks to place these organizations (and their leaders) in the
political sphere along with other actors. In other words, it’s important that these groups get
the attention that they deserve.
Leadership and Entrepreneurship
So far, this chapter has discussed organizations and ideology. However, leadership is
a crucial variable in many of the studies of the policymaking process, yet in most of the
aforementioned literature, it is not generally considered. As Kingdon (2003, 180) points out,
in the policy change cases he studied, every issue had at least one person, and sometimes a
small group, who were instrumental in guiding legislation through to enactment. This study,
too, seeks to develop a new way to think about the executives in nonprofit advocacy
organizations in order to contribute to our understanding of leadership and entrepreneurship
broadly, and nonprofit advocacy specifically. Whether it is designing the incentives to recruit
and retain members, or framing and advancing an issue in the policy making process, the
executives of interest groups should be considered central to the organization’s operations
and activities. They are strategic actors that must choose where and how to disburse the
organization’s resources and must manage the often conflicting interests of their stakeholders.
Who is a nonprofit executive, and what do they do? To define these individuals, most
rely upon models of entrepreneurship, and economic models of entrepreneurship have been
used for decades to describe business executives, especially those who guide start-ups or
other small businesses (Hemingway 2005). In this context, Schumpeter (1934) defines an

34

entrepreneur as an individual who combines existing resources in new, innovative ways.
Indeed, innovation was a crucial determinant of entrepreneurial behavior in the firm.
However, over the past several decades, the idea of the entrepreneur has taken on a broader
meaning, and has been applied across the sectors – public, private and nonprofit – to describe
agents of change.
Social Entrepreneurs
In the nonprofit context, Anheier (2005, 127) states that a social entrepreneur differs
from the business entrepreneur in that instead of monetary or economic returns, they seek
social value. These individuals help to define the mission of the organization and relentlessly
pursue opportunities to advance that mission and engage in adaptation and innovation,
regardless of available resources. Waddock and Post (1991, 394) argue that social
entrepreneurs are characterized in three dimensions: first, the problem to be solved must be a
complex one, which the entrepreneur is able to distill into a unifying vision. Second, the
entrepreneur leverages her own credibility to recruit and organize resources, and third, the
entrepreneur is able to generate the commitment of others.
Although social entrepreneurs, broadly defined, often put mission first, social
entrepreneurship can include innovations in service delivery as well as social change. In fact,
nonprofit entrepreneurship can be seen across the various types of organizations that exist,
from service groups, to religious and political organizations (Young 1983). For example, a
nonprofit manager that finds a new way to approach an existing problem – such as
homelessness or support for an arts organization – can be considered a social entrepreneur.
Social entrepreneurship has more recently been combined with the creation of social
enterprises, where the organization makes use of market mechanisms to create a social good
(Hemingway 2005; Anheier, Ben-Nur, and Young 2003). Using this definition, a nonprofit

35

may engage in social entrepreneurship through the development of a commercial enterprise
that supports their overall mission. Homeboy Industries, a Los Angeles-based organization,
whose primary mission is to reduce gang violence, is a great example. They fund many of
their programs, such as tattoo removal and employment services, through commercial
enterprises including a popular bakery and catering business and selling merchandise
(Homeboy Industries 2013).
Political Entrepreneurs
In the interest group literature these leaders are usually called policy or political
entrepreneurs (Moe 1988; Mintrom and Norman 2009; Kingdon 2003), and tend to focus on
specific policy changes. Mintrom and Norman (2009, 650) define policy entrepreneurs as
those with a “desire to significantly change current ways of doing things in their area of
interest.” For example, an individual promoting narrow business interests such as industry-
specific tax breaks can be considered a policy entrepreneur. So too, can a government
administrator who seeks to solve a problem with service provision, or a nonprofit executive
who seeks social change on issues such as the environment or civil rights. Kingdon (2003,
122–23) proposes that the defining characteristics of policy entrepreneurs are their
“willingness to invest their resources – time, energy, reputation, and sometimes money – in
the hope of a future return. That return might come to them in the form of policies of which
they approve, satisfaction from participation, or even personal aggrandizement in the form of
job security.” Along the lines of Clark and Wilson’s (1961) incentives typology, individuals
may be drawn to policy entrepreneurship for material (career growth), solidary or purposive
reasons. This could mean they work to benefit a small group, or are driving broader social
change.

36

The key distinguishing factor between these definitions is that while the social
entrepreneur may seek a social good, achieving it does not necessarily require policy change.
On the other hand, the policy entrepreneur may be interested in policy change, but it may not
provide social value. The policy entrepreneur in the nonprofit advocacy organization is a
unique individual tasked with not only recruiting and maintaining a wide base of supporters,
but also seeks to influence policymakers in order to pursue the organization’s mission. Often
these missions seek a wider social good like civil rights, or other public goods like clean air
or the protection of endangered species. Forming and maintaining these organizations is
particularly difficult in a context in which resources are scarce and benefits may be few.
Following the work of Olson (1965), Salisbury (1969) and others, Chong (1991, 125)
recognizes that political entrepreneurs in social movements are those who will “pay the costs
of soliciting and coordinating contributions in exchange for individual benefits such as
power, prestige, or a share of the profits derived from collective action” (see also Hampton
1987). While individuals may be drawn to certain fields for purely rational reasons, it is also
likely that reputational concerns, or even altruism, may also be a factor in compelling
individuals to take executive positions within a movement (Chong 1991). For example,
Chong describes many African-American executives engaged in the civil rights movement
who already had significant community ties and were thus drafted or otherwise felt obligated
to serve their communities in leadership roles during the civil rights movement.
Organizational Behavior
What is interesting about research on policy or social entrepreneurship is the emphasis
on either one executive, or a small group of executives, that provide the direction and
cohesion necessary for organizational formation and effectiveness. However, what does an
entrepreneur do when he or she is in charge of running the day-to-day operations of a

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nonprofit advocacy organization? Do their preferences and values make a difference in
organizational outcomes? To date these questions have not been asked.
Once again, it is necessary to turn to research on the firm where the influence of
executives is recognized and studied. In a for-profit context, Finkelstein, et al. (1996, 3)
argue that “the small group of people at the top of an organization can dramatically affect
organizational outcomes. Executives make big and small decisions. They shape the
frameworks by which their organizations hire, mobilize, and inspire others to make
decisions.” The characteristics of executives – whether experiences, personalities, values or
beliefs – act as motives and filters shaping the decision making of management (Hambrick
and Mason 1984; Hambrick 2007; Hemingway 2005). For example, in one study, for-profit
narcissistic CEOs were found to launch bolder projects and take more organizational risks
than their counterparts (Chatterjee and Hambrick 2007). Additionally, liberal CEOs have
been found to be more likely to have their firms engage in corporate social responsibility
programs than their conservative counterparts (Chin, Hambrick, and Treviño 2013).
In the public sector, the influence of executives of government agencies has also been
studied, especially in research on the balance of power and bureaucratic control. Agency
executives and agency staff are seen as potentially implementing policies more in line with
their own expertise or political beliefs than with the wishes of Congress (bureaucratic drift).
Scholars of American public administration have been very interested in identifying the ways
in which Congress, or the President, can control and influence agencies they often see as
straying from Congressional or presidential intent (McCubbins, Noll, and Weingast 1987;
Hammond and Knott 1996; Moe 2008; Knott and Miller 1987; Huber and Shipan 2002). For
example, Bertelli and Grose (2009) studied the ideology of federal-level agency secretaries in
the distribution of resources to various districts around the country. Their “ideologically

38

contingent executive decision making (ICD) theory” (2009, 926) states that due to the
influence by multiple principals, and the competition and often conflict between the President
and Congress, agency secretaries are able to leverage additional autonomy. In other words,
their personal ideology will influence the choices made by their agency in implementing
public policy – which may or may not be consistent with the wishes of the President or
Congress.
Few scholars, however, have studied the role of nonprofit executives from this
perspective (Phipps and Burbach 2010). The executives of nonprofit advocacy organizations
are responsible for not only the day-to-day management of an organization’s staff and
operations, but in addition, provide key political leadership and strategic management for the
group. As Young (1987, 177) writes, “the appropriate model for the nonprofit executive is
not the political wheeler-dealer, the capitalist venturer and marketer, the disciplined technical
manager, or the master of interpersonal relations – but a special mix of all these things.” For
the advocacy executive, add policy analyzer and political strategist to this list.
While strong executive leadership has been seen as a determinant of organization
performance before (Herman and Heimovics 1990), and policy and social entrepreneurs are
considered crucial to policy change, it is surprising to consider that little attention has been
paid to the values, expertise and experience of executives in nonprofit advocacy
organizations. Rose-Ackerman (1987) theorizes, in the context of a single charitable
organization, that the preferences of the executive would have implications in both the mix of
services provided by the organization, as well as the executive’s relationship with different
types of funders. As government grants increase, the executive will feel less accountable to
individual donors and will spend less time engaging in costly interactions with others that
may not share their own preferences. However, little empirical research has been completed

39

to test Rose-Ackerman’s claim in the nonprofit sector generally, or among nonprofit
advocacy groups specifically. In one limited study, Taliento and Silverman (2008) attempt to
compare for-profit and nonprofit leadership by interviewing nonprofit executives who had
left the for-profit sector, finding that these executives had to adapt to less authority, a wider
range of stakeholders, additional communications requirements and a lack of resources.
Macy (2006), on the other hand, finds that nonprofit employee values are linked to
organizational outcomes, but didn’t study the executives specifically.
Conclusion
This chapter was an ambitious attempt to trace the types of individuals and
organizations that are engaged in public policy in the United States. Using a positive political
theoretical approach to organizations and the structural and legal constraints found in each
type of group, it began to describe the underlying incentives that might explain why political
actors behave in some ways and not others. Specifically, it describes the way in which
personal political preferences, an individual’s ideology, can affect politics and political
outcomes. Leaders of nonprofit advocacy organizations can be assumed to have closely held
political preferences, and since other organizations have seen organizational behavior
influenced by executive preferences, so too, should nonprofit advocacy organizations. The
following chapters will lay out a new conceptualization of nonprofit advocacy executives by
first developing a new way to think about executives in this context, followed by some
intriguing evidence of the theory in practice.

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“You’re only as good as your E.D.”
-Nonprofit executive in northern California
CHAPTER 3: A COMMON AGENCY THEORY OF LEADERSHIP IN
NONPROFIT ADVOCACY ORGANIZATIONS

In the previous chapter, the theories on organizations, advocacy and leadership were
presented to provide a foundation that can be used as a starting point for a new way of
thinking about nonprofit advocacy organizations and their executives. This chapter builds on
that foundation and provides a new conceptualization with which to evaluate the role of these
nonprofit executives. Using a common agency framework, this conceptualization suggests
that executives have much more autonomy in managing their organizations than theory has
previously suggested. I argue that characteristics of executives in nonprofit advocacy
organizations, including their political ideology and their ideological distance from key
policymakers, will have broad and tangible implications on the decision-making of the group.
Following a discussion of the common agency framework, this chapter presents various
groups that nonprofit advocacy executives must contend with. Particular attention is paid to
the relationship between the nonprofit executive, the Board of Directors, and legislators,
along with the role of volunteers and members in the organization. It also presents several
specific hypotheses that can be tested in later chapters using data from a statewide survey of
nonprofit executives.
The common agency framework seeks to understand the relationship between
multiple principals with a single agent (Bernheim and Whinston 1986) – which can also be
characterized as a collective action problem. Each principal can be assumed to have their
own preferences, and seeks to maximize their own utility. Bernheim and Whinston (1986)

41

define two types of common agent: a delegated common agent which can be created through
the delegation of authority by a set of principals, sometimes independently, such as those who
assist in expediting wholesale trade efforts. “[I]ntrinsic common agency, on the other hand,
arises when an individual is ‘naturally’ endowed with the right to make a particular decision
affecting other parties, who may, in turn attempt to influence that decision” (Bernheim and
Whinston 1986, 924). Intrinsic common agency is typified by both governmental and
nongovernmental planning with multiple constituencies (Bernheim and Whinston 1986;
Romano 2013) and is a good place to start in the discussion of nonprofit advocacy executives
and their relationship with the multiple parties that seek to influence them, and that they seek
to influence – such as the board of directors, legislators and their members.
Common Agency versus Stakeholder Theory
It’s important at this point to mention that there is another, commonly used, theory
that seeks to understand the role of various groups involved in an organization’s
environment: Stakeholder Theory (Freeman 1984; Freeman and Reed 1983). Stakeholder
theory recognizes that various groups have an interest in the outcomes of the organization,
and a stakeholder can be defined as “any person or group that is able to make a claim on an
organization’s attention, resources or output or who may be affected by the organization”
(Lewis 2001, 202). In the nonprofit context, Van Pueyvelde, et al. (2012, 434) identifies
several stakeholder groups that are important to the organization: internal groups such as
board members, managers, employees and volunteers, and external groups including funders,
beneficiaries, suppliers and contractors, competitors and organizational partners. A nonprofit
organization has to effectively manage the expectations and needs of each of these groups in
order to maximize their group’s performance.

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While Stakeholder Theory has a strong intuitive power in describing organizations
and their environment – and the common agency framework can also recognize these same
groups -- operationalizing the concept has been challenging for researchers trying to
understand why and how stakeholders seek to receive their claims and influence the
organization’s behavior. It’s not surprising then, that many scholars use the language of
principal-agent relationships to describe these relationships. Indeed, one team went so far as
to develop what they termed “Stakeholder-Agency Theory” (Hill and Jones 1992).
In Stakeholder-Agency Theory, Hill and Jones (1992) argue that principal-agent
relationships can be considered a subset of a larger set of stakeholder approaches. I would
argue the opposite: that stakeholder theory should be seen as embedded in a broader
conceptualization of agency theory. While Stakeholder Theory often focuses on an agent’s
concern over managing the various stakeholders present in the environment, agency theory in
general, and the common agency framework specifically, recognizes that agents are not only
concerned with the interests of their various stakeholders, but are concerned about their own
self-interest as well. In other words, the managers of organizations are concerned about
maximizing their own utility, not just the organization’s outcomes. In trying to understand
the ways in which executives make choices in managing their organization, it is important to
recognize that the executive is also seeking to protect and enhance their own credibility and
expertise.
The Common Agency Framework
According to Bernheim and Whinston (1986), what makes the common agency
approach unique is not just the presence of several principals guiding one common agent, but
that these various principles often have conflicting interests in guiding the agent. If the
multiple principals engaged in monitoring a single agent were coordinated in their goals, the

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problem would better be understood as a traditional principal-agent problem. Instead, in a
common agency environment, each principal simultaneously and “not cooperatively”
(Romano 2013, 98) attempts to form a contract and design incentives with which to control
the agent. Each principal may not have information about the contracts formed with their
common agent among the other principals, and each may or may not be aware of each other’s
interests and preferences. In other words, these competing preferences lead to a collective
action problem (Gailmard 2009). The costs for each principal in this scenario are high, and
there are incentives for each principal to free-ride on the monitoring and oversight of the
executive if they assume others are filling that role. In addition, the influence of each group
is diffused by the existence of the multiple principals. In the context of the nonprofit
advocacy organizations, the executives of these groups must contend with a large number of
principals (or stakeholders) that may have very different views on what the organizations is
doing and how they should do it, and each group likely does not have information on the
other groups. For example, the membership of a nonprofit advocacy organization may have
very different expectations on the direction of the organization than the Board of Directors,
and likely to do not have information about plans of the Board or the Executive Director.
The Board on the other hand, may have only a vague understanding of what its constituents
might actually like to see happen. It would be expected that in a contentious policy
environment, these differing demands may be even more acutely felt.
One solution to this challenge, monitoring and/or collecting information, can be costly
to the various principals, and coordinating their efforts even more so, leading to inefficiencies
in obtaining a “first-best” outcome. In addition, the agent’s behavior is often not observable
by the various groups at any given time. While each principal shares in the oversight roles
over the behavior of their agent, the “leakages” of information across different principals
adds to the costs (Gailmard 2009). The implication of this scenario is that the agent is able to

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observe and then aggregate these various interests among the principals and then makes a
choice regarding the distribution of utility across the parties by adhering to the wishes of
some stakeholders more than others. Gailmard (2009) argues that multiple principals
providing multiple views on oversight actually increases the discretion of the executive.
Principals can pose additional restrictions on their agent, but as Bertelli and Grose (2009)
point out in the case of Congressional influence over federal agency executives, any given
member of Congress has limited overall control over decisions, diffusing their control. The
agent is well aware of this environment, and it is this fact that allows him or her to leverage
their personal beliefs and values in the implementation of their chosen strategies. These
strategies could include simple decisions such as the day-to-day operations of the group, or
more serious ones such as how to use the (usually limited) resources of the organization,
which political tactics to undertake or which benefits to distribute to members and supporters.
This obviously leaves the agent in a position where they are able to determine the best course
of action not only for the organization, but also for themselves. In the context of nonprofit
advocacy executives, this allows them a significant amount of autonomy, or simply put,
power, which they can leverage both inside and outside their organizations.
The common agency model, like agency theory generally, has been applied to a
variety of different public and private contexts. In the context of government and
nongovernmental organizations, the incentives the principals are able to offer are often not
monetary. In other words, the contracts in the political environment may be explicit, such as
a formal employment contract for a bureaucrat which outlines expectations, but they are just
as likely to be implicit agreements. For example, these arrangements might be based on
some form of political support such as votes, positive public relations, selecting a specific
policy instrument desired by one group, or introducing or co-sponsoring a piece of legislation
sought by the agent (Bertelli and Lynn Jr 2004). The model has also been extended by those

45

such as Laussel and Le Breton (1998), who model a common agency problem in the context
of a profit maximizing firm that produces a public good through voluntary contributions. In
their model, the agent withholds some information from the various principals – that of the
cost function in producing the good. When this information is known before the negotiations
with principals begin, it causes a lack of efficiency in the final result. Dixit, Grossman and
Helpman (1997) apply the common agency theory to economic legislation, suggesting that
lobbying organizations will seek specific policy outcomes, and promise benefits like
campaign contributions to Congress. Since the government as a whole is assumed to care
more for social outcomes than fulfilling the utility of the lobbyists, the government selects a
solution from among the competing policy instruments. Bertelli and Grose (2009) argue that
bureaucratic agents are also prone to a common agency problem – with competition between
the President and individual members of Congress for policy influence. The agents, in this
environment, are seen to thus leverage their own political beliefs (outside of Congress or the
Executive) in distributing grants to the public. Bertelli and Lynn (2004) describe another
common agency context – implementation of human services by public agencies. Assuming
complete information, they explore the hidden action among the providers of human services.
They ultimately find that the mix of groups engaged in policy implementation, including
interest groups, and legislators, each exert their own control over the process and outcomes.
The common agency framework has rarely been applied to the nonprofit sector, which
is surprising considering the wide acknowledgement of the large number of stakeholders
nonprofit executives have to contend with on a day-to-day basis (see, for example, Van
Puyvelde et al. 2012; Abzug and Webb 1999; Ben-Ner and Van Hoomissen 1991). One
challenge of approaching the common agency framework from the nonprofit perspective is
that it can be difficult to differentiate between principals and agents, since as we’ve seen, the
lines of ownership and control are not always obvious (Ostrower and Stone 2006; Fama and

46

Jensen 1983). In addition, some principals can be considered formal and institutionalized,
such as the Board of Directors, while others may be more informal outside of the
organization, such as elected officials, donors or the community of potential members that the
executive may want to recruit. This dynamic is even more challenging for the nonprofit
executive, as the various principals and the incentives they use to the control the organization
are fluid and often overlapping. Board members can be donors, policymakers may be donors,
too, or sit on the organization’s Board. As discussed above, the nonprofit executive exists in
the space between these multiple principals. Romano (2013) does apply the common agency
theory to nonprofit organizations generally, with the Board of Directors as the agent, and
while Prakash and Gugerty (2011) suggest a common agency framework with multiple
principals in their book on collective action and nonprofit advocacy groups, they study the
problem at the organizational level and do not attempt to explicitly untangle the various
incentives that each principal seeks to use.
Common Agency in Nonprofit Advocacy Organizations
In our context, the nonprofit executive can be considered the agent, and the variety of
stakeholders, including the Board of Directors, members and donors, elected officials and the
general public, are its principals. Some of these principals have explicit institutional
relationships with their agent – such as the Board of Directors. Others are more implicit, but
no less powerful, such as the relationship between policymakers and the executive, or
between the executive and the organization’s members. The agreements that the executive
enters into with these various principals are the menu of incentives the principals offer to
influence the executive’s behavior. The executive, then, is able to congeal the interests of the
various principals and weigh them against his or her own personal preferences. For example,
prior to making a decision on whether or not to support a particular piece of legislation, the

47

executive will consider the positions of all of her stakeholders, and come to the best decision,
not just for the organization, but for herself as well.
It is assumed that the executive is not only interested in maximizing policy change,
but that her personal preferences may include a desire for power, prestige, legitimacy,
professional advancement, or other reputational or financial rewards. The executive also
holds values and beliefs, and of particular importance in the case of advocacy organizations, a
particular political ideology as defined in the previous chapter by Lane (1962). If an
executive finds herself distant from the organization’s principals in ideology or in other ways,
I argue that that she would likely select ex ante institutional tools and tactics that shields her
from engaging in an activity inconsistent with her personal beliefs, which protects her from a
loss of utility. For example, executives that find themselves far outside the mainstream of the
body they are trying to influence (such as the legislature) might be expected to hire a lobbyist
to represent the organization’s interests or they may establish a policy committee (made up of
internal as well as external candidates) to provide guidance on key policy issues facing the
organization. Executives would also be able to guide the organization in both direct and
subtle ways, based on what they think it best for the group –despite the preferences of one
stakeholder group or another. Taken together, executives leverage their own beliefs and
experiences in guiding their organizations to maximize their utility, including increasing their
own credibility and prestige.
The Board of Directors and the Executive
Much of the research into nonprofit governance and decision making focuses on the
organization’s Board of Directors (Herman and Heimovics 1990; Coombes et al. 2011;
Bigelow, Stone, and Arndt 1996). The differences between nonprofit and for-profit
governance structures are another way nonprofit groups differ from other organizational

48

forms, a difference that has implications for Board-Executive relationships. By law, all
formal nonprofit organizations in the United States have a Board of Directors that have
fiduciary and oversight responsibilities, and are responsible for hiring and firing the executive
as well as setting their compensation (Ostrower and Stone 2006). In smaller organizations,
the Board is tasked with electing a chair or president that will fill this leadership role. Unlike
the for-profit sector, however, these board members usually serve in a volunteer capacity
without compensation and are volunteers in their own right. They are also unable to reap any
financial rewards from organization profits (Hansmann 1980; 1987). While some have
argued that this means that they serve in a purely altruistic capacity despite their own self-
interests (Smith 1992; 1995), it can also be understood that a board member’s incentives to
serve may be purposive or solidary rather than material (Clark and Wilson 1961; Salisbury
1969). For example, they might gain personal utility from the organization’s political
mission (a purposive goal), and might enjoy the relationships they build with other board
members (a solidary benefit), or seek to gain personal prestige by serving on a particular
Board. Indeed, findings on the study of board members and governance in practice has been
quite different from the expectation of the purely altruistic board member (Stone and
Ostrower 2007; Oster 1995). Individuals can be drawn to board leadership not just out of a
sense of altruism or service, but to satisfy other preferences including social or professional
benefits (Widmer 1985).
In addition, Oster (1995) suggests that due to the nature of nonprofit Boards (large
groups, usually external to the organization, short tenures, etc.) they are prone to capture by
their executive directors, where the executive has control over the board members and their
activities. In other words, instead of being clear-minded, objective instruments of an
organization’s mission, at a minimum they can be subject to the vision and leadership of the
executive in many of the same ways as the for-profit sector (Young 1987). This could easily

49

be characterized as a collective action problem, since the diffusion of interests among
members and the costs of coordination (Bertelli and Lynn Jr 2004) weakens the influence of
each member as well as the board as a whole. For example, board members can be assumed
to have their own individual policy preferences, which may be different from the Board as a
whole, but the nature of a group where majority rules means that each individual member has
limited authority over the final decision. Since the Board often votes on issues before the
organization, including hiring the executive, members can be seen as bargaining over the
organization’s direction. Much like a politician seeks to earn the support of a median voter in
politics to earn a majority (Downs 1957), each Board member seeks to see their own policy
preferences implemented by the Board, and thus seeks the median board member’s support
on any particular issue.
Hiring a staff member can therefore be seen as a negotiation between the competing
interests on the Board. Similar to the “make or buy” decisions in the firm, the Board of
Directors chooses to “buy” expertise and enter into a contract with an agent rather than
managing organizational operations themselves. In the mission-driven environment, and
specifically among advocacy organizations, the personal political views of the executive are
an important determination in hiring and management of the Executive Director by the Board
of Directors. The ally principle (Epstein and O’Halloran 1999; Ferejohn and Shipan 1990;
Bendor and Meirowitz 2004) suggests that that Board would be interested in selecting an
executive who is ideologically consistent with the mission of the organization and the
preferences of the board members.
However, since the Board is aware of the other principals in their environment,
members would also seek to elevate someone that would best balance the competing needs of
the organization’s stakeholders. So, instead of hiring an ally ideologically identical to the

50

Board, members would instead be expected to strategically chose an agent that helps to offset
the influence or can effectively leverage the interests of these other parties (Bertelli and
Feldmann 2006; Ben-Ner and Van Hoomissen 1991; S. Van Puyvelde et al. 2011; Abzug and
Webb 1999). This would especially be the case if the Board was seeking expertise to manage
specific constituencies with different ideological viewpoints than their own. For example, a
Board made up of members far left on the political spectrum may choose a candidate with an
ideology more to the center politically if the goal is to build relationships with key members
of the legislature (if the median legislator is more to the center than the Board is).
Additionally, while the executive has an incentive to work for an organization that is
similar to their own personal ideological perspectives, their preferences may not be identical
to those of the organization as a whole. They may prefer specific legislative tactics (such as
lobbying versus more confrontational tactics), or specific policy instruments over others.
This information may or may not be shared directly with the Board of Directors during the
hiring process, as it can be assumed the candidate wants the job and may withhold
information that they feel might weaken their chances of being hired. Once hired, it is also
the responsibility of the executive (or in smaller organizations, the Board president or chair)
to manage the day-to-day operations of the organization. So, instead of blithely carrying out
the wishes of the organization’s Board of Directors, the executive would not only seek to
capture the Board, but would also implement structural elements inside the organization that
might provide a check on the influence of the Board of Directors and provide support for
their own positions. This would particularly be the case if the executive and Board’s
preferences were regularly in conflict.
Following the selection of a candidate, the Board also has a responsibility to monitor
the executive in an attempt to ensure compliance with the organization’s preferred actions

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and policies. The executive is not only aware of the preferences of the Board, and their
attempts to influence them through monitoring, but is also aware of the other principals and
their preferences. The executive is worried about keeping the Board happy and donors
satisfied (with their various interests), volunteers engaged, the public informed and legislators
reliant upon the organization’s information. Although the executive may weigh the
preferences of the Board more heavily than that of other parties, these other groups do also
influence the decision making of the executive. In addition, if an executive finds themselves
politically distant from the Board, he would select specific ex ante institutional tools and
tactics that shield him from engaging in an activity inconsistent with his personal beliefs.
Adding Policymakers to the Framework
Thus far, we have discussed the relationship between the executive and his or her
Board of Directors. Another audience important to nonprofit advocacy organizations is
policymakers, that is, those individuals that serve in government as either elected officials or
in bureaucratic agencies. The relationship between nonprofit organizations, policymakers,
and the Board is a complex one that has significant implications for all three groups. This
section introduces policymakers to the common agency framework.
Nonprofit advocacy organizations can be seen as interested in influencing policy
change at the local, state, federal level or in the international arena, and most of the literature
on interest groups makes the interaction between the organization and the policymaker a key
dimension of policymaking and policy change (Berry and Wilcox 2009; Truman 1951; Dahl
1961; Salisbury 1969; Berry and Arons 2005; Jenkins 2006; Andrews and Edwards 2004),
and the interaction between the policy entrepreneur and the policymaker is recognized as a
crucial relationship (Kingdon 2003; Ainsworth 1993; Anheier, Ben-Nur, and Young 2003;
Waddock and Post 1991; Mintrom and Norman 2009; Ainsworth and Sened 1993; Grossman

52

and Helpman 2002). Simply put, in order to be successful in reaching the organization’s
mission, the organization seeks to influence policymakers – whether they are legislators or
bureaucrats – in order to win policy change.
At the heart of the approach to understanding this relationship is the cost of
information between the policymakers and the nonprofit. Legislators would like to be able to
obtain information relevant to both the issue at hand as well as understand the political
support or consequences that may exist for taking one position over another, and they often
rely upon interest groups to provide this information (Ainsworth 1993). The nonprofit
organization, on the other hand, is keen to protect its information in order to maintain a
credible position in the policy discussion. Knowing that legislators may seek to balance the
preferences of a diverse array of interests, a lobbyist may even exaggerate his claims in order
to gain additional influence and be more likely to have the winning position (Ainsworth
1993). The policymakers then seek to regulate lobbyists in order to compel additional
information from them and their organization.
Research has also been divided on “who” interest groups lobby. While the traditional
view suggests that interest groups spend more resources lobbying their legislative friends
(Baumgartner and Leech 1996), others have suggested that lobbyists will not only speak with
their friends to counteract opposition attempts to gain their support, but also communicate
with swing votes (Austen-Smith and Wright 1994). Not surprisingly, Kollman (1997)
suggests that who a lobbyist lobbies is entirely dependent on the context. As he writes, “A
lobbyist concerned about a policy issue has no choice but to lobby enemies if everyone on the
decisive Congressional committee deciding the fate of the policy is a legislative enemy”
(Kollman 1997, 520).

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In this environment, the relationship between Board of Directors, the executive, and
policymakers plays an important role, specifically in their selection of the executive to guide
the organization. It has been argued that the Board will select a candidate that will be able to
address the preferences of the competing principals – including policymakers. If the goal is
to just lobby friends, it could be expected for the Board to select a candidate whose
preferences are more in line with those policymakers that are likely to support the
organization’s positions. If, on the other hand, the goal is to lobby both friends and enemies,
we may see a Board much more interested in selecting a candidate who can appeal to both
parties, as well as swing votes. In other words, the Board would be interested in hiring a
candidate that is appealing to the “pivotal” lawmakers (Krehbiel 2010), or those lawmakers
that can provide either the majority and the “super-majority” vote to over-ride a veto. We
would expect to see more moderate candidates selected in this environment. Here, it is
possible to present the first hypothesis that will be tested in later chapters.
Hypothesis 1: The Board will choose an executive with ideological preferences that
appeal to the politically pivotal legislators rather than members at the extremes.
Nonprofit advocacy organizations are able to provide the costly information to
government, while they simultaneously seek policy change. The example of Planned
Parenthood Action Fund from the previous chapter is a good case in point. Through their
organizing activities, they were able to provide information about the strength of their
constituency both electorally and legislatively with policymakers. They also had a clear
position on the issue before policymakers and were seeking specific outcomes, and were not
shy in educating both the public and legislators about the number of women their programs
supported, or the human consequences that a loss of funding would cause. This type of
political action is a regular staple of nonprofit advocacy organizations, who simultaneously

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share their preferred policy positions with policymakers, while mobilizing supporters to
speak out to their representatives.
But how do organizations (and their leaders) develop the information that politicians
find valuable? The process of “strategic capacity building” (Bertelli 2012) provides a
different process where organizations can be successful in meeting their missions. In
delegating tasks like information and political support to nonprofit advocacy organizations,
the group has incentives to build their own expertise and capacity in specific areas. Political
economists have studied this dynamic in the context of delegating powers by a politician to
an administrative agency, uncovering incentives that relate to the kinds of issues with which
resource dependence theorists have been grappling. These delegation problems are
fundamental to democratic public administration and occur when discretionary authority for a
task is assigned to a third-party actor who faces incentives for complying with the goals of
the state actor making the assignment.
Central to the delegation problem is a conflict of interest, which in the present case
emerges from the divergence between the goals of the nonprofit advocacy organization and
policymakers. The nonprofit organization makes choices about acquiring expertise that can
incentivize politicians to shape their policy goals in a particular way. Ting (2011) examines a
tradeoff between political (i.e., left-right) ideology and task quality, which increases when an
organization improves its ability to provide a service. He considers two types of organizations
that receive delegations. A generalist, on the one hand, cannot improve the quality of
particular services it provides by investment, but, rather, can only enhance its capacity to
perform all tasks for which it has been delegated responsibility. A specialist, on the other
hand, can make investments that improve its relative capacity to improve the delivery of one
service in its portfolio of responsibilities rather than another. The agency’s choices about

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capacity improvements shape the alternatives that the politician is able to consider. This is
the agenda influence of strategic capacity building. Thus, nonprofit advocacy organizations
may seek policy change on only a narrow band of issues, rather than a broad range of issues.
For example, it is rare for an environmental group to get involved in gun control issues –
although both issues could be considered at the left end of the ideological spectrum. So, too,
a civil rights group focusing on one specific constituency, say African-American voters, is
not likely to get involved directly in marriage equality litigation.
Ting shows that a specialist can rely on the relative superiority of a preferred task to
incentivize politicians into a difficult choice about which kinds of services government
should provide. In this scenario, politicians may be forced to choose between offering their
constituents a poor quality service that they most prefer and a high quality service in which
they are not interested but which is preferred by the organization to which delivery authority
is being delegated. This means that a specialist wanting to impact the character of services
provided by the government in congruence with its mission can invest in capacity building
that improves some services, but not others, and such investment increases with the policy
conflict between the organization and politicians. This makes delegation to the organization
less attractive for the politicians, but the choice may be between delegating to the
organization and no service provision at all. A generalist cannot compel such political
tradeoffs, and the politician can appropriate the organization’s capacity in furtherance of its
own policy goals or not delegate at all. Specialists can be entrepreneurial in using
investments in their capacity to make some services look better even to politicians who do
not want to provide them. Of course, such incentives are sufficiently generic to apply to for-
profit contractors as well, but the mission of nonprofit organizations makes them particularly
interesting.

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Because of the way in which this expertise is conceptualized in theoretical models
such as Ting’s (2011), an organization’s expertise is “a single piece of information” about the
relevant state of the world that the politician does not know (Callander 2008, 124). If the
politician acquires that one piece of information, it too becomes a specialist. Callander
(2008) develops an alternative conception of this approach which requires the politician to
acquire far more specialized knowledge than they can acquire. The impact of the state of the
world on policy change is more erratic than in the foregoing models, meaning that the
variation in outcomes can be significant. Callendar (2008) asserts that the complicated
reaction of outcomes to the state of the world yields a process of delivery that is less
invertible, or not fully understandable, by the politician. This is an important aspect of
information exchange contributing to the outcome uncertainty characteristic of “coping
organizations” (Wilson 1989, 168). An organization having non-invertible expertise can use
it to compel the politician to support policy change that is consistent with its mission. The
politician can appropriate invertible expertise, but the organization knows this as well and no
delegation happens. This has the important implication that information or action may not be
provided unless the process of delivering them is sufficiently complex.
When expertise is not invertible, Callander (2008) shows that the politician has the
incentive to delegate information or action as provided by the organization that outweighs the
(potentially very high) cost of developing the non-invertible expertise for herself. In other
words, the politician will not make an investment into seeking information or developing
expertise on a particular program or problem. They may rely upon the organization to
provide political cover, or generate a high volume of public comments on a controversial
issue rather than trying to develop this activity themselves. Where non-invertible expertise
characterizes the service delivery process, an organization may be given substantial access or
influence that privileges its own policy preferences over those of the politician. The politician

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delegates because it can do no better without finding a new organization to provide the
information, which she will only do so if the organization is doing something so onerous that
these search costs are worth incurring. Specialist organizations, which are the only ones
likely to receive delegations due to the fact that their expertise is not easily invertible, can
incentivize politicians to select some policy instruments over others, because they have used
capacity investments to make sure they are not only at the table, but that their preferred
policy outcomes are given more weight by the politician.
Bertelli (2012, p. 128) calls this process by which administrative agencies or, in our
case, nonprofit organizations use capacity investments — or mission enhancement — to
shape the state and its policy agenda strategic capacity building. The incentives captured by
strategic capacity building compel expectations that capacity enhancements be designed to
make an organization’s expertise less and less invertible over time. This, in fact, may be
enhanced when governments rely on a small number or a single available organization. Non-
invertibility is similar in effect to asset specificity in transactions cost economic theory,
which denotes “the degree to which an asset can be redeployed to alternative uses and by
alternative users without sacrifice of productive value” (Williamson 1996, 59). Non-
invertible service delivery processes, like specific assets, can generate a “hold up” problem in
which the government can extract concessions from the nonprofit because the service has
little marketability elsewhere. Strategic capacity building allows the contractor to
strategically shape its service portfolio to potentially counteract this “hold up” problem and
make its relationship with its government support, rather than generate drift from its mission
(Bertelli 2012, 129).
Strategic capacity building suggests that a nonprofit can make choices about acquiring
expertise that can incentivize politicians to shape the policy agenda in a particular way. In

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the context of the nonprofit advocacy organization, this expertise may be an ability to acquire
specialized information – such as research on policy issues, provide legitimacy and access to
donors through endorsements, or being able to leverage a large number of members or
supporters through grassroots action. This happens simply because such organizations have
developed the capacity to credibly provide good outcomes for things they prefer to do.
Callander’s (2008) argument implies that we should expect capacity acquired by the
organizations over time to be in regard to complex tasks. Such capacity cannot be easily
appropriated, particularly by political principals to further their own policy agendas.
A good example of this in practice would be the National Rifle Association (NRA),
which has spent the better part of a century building a cadre of gun enthusiasts, gun producers
and retailers to support their interpretation of the second amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Their expertise on legislation regarding gun regulation has made them the go-to organization
on these measures in Congress. Add in the organization’s very large membership base
(which they have stated is over 4 million) (Kessler 2013), and political campaign
contributions, and they are able to offer significant political support, or opposition, to
politicians that take positions on the issue of gun control. Many even recognize that the
NRA, for all intents and purposes, controls the national debate on gun ownership and
regulation (Palmer 2012).
In the common agency framework, the executive would be expected to make
decisions that will increase an organization’s capacity and expertise in ways that their own
preferences dictate. For example, we would expect that an executive who is committed to
grassroots activism would look to develop the organization’s political influence by growing
the organization’s membership and group of active supporters. Individuals that are more
interested in developing the organization’s expertise in a particular policy area may find ways

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to increase the organization’s ability to develop cutting-edge research on issues consistent
with the organization’s mission. In other words, if the executive believes that one course of
action is better than another, she would seek to guide the organization in the direction that is
most consistent with her internal values and preferences.
In addition, the executive will also consider his or her own relationship with
legislators as important. As McKay (2010) suggests, organizational ideology may have an
effect on selection of advocacy tactics, finding that extreme groups were less likely to lobby
than make campaign contributions, and that those groups more ideologically close to
Congress were more likely to have increased expenditures on lobbying. Since we can assume
that the executive wants to remain credible, and build his or her own prestige, this has
implications for tactical choices. The more distant the executive is from the median
legislator, it would be expected that he would chose tactics or strategies that will shield him
from the loss of utility he would experience having to deal with ideologically distant
members of the legislature. This is particularly important if one considers the median voter
in each house. For example, if an executive is distant from the median legislator, he or she
might opt to either hire a lobbyist that can have those face-to-face conversations, rather than
doing it themselves. Or, the executive may opt to empower volunteers to engage in the
lobbying, or organize a policy committee on the Board to shelter themselves from having to
make a decision on strategy or tactics in regards to how or who the organization lobbies.
Following this logic, then, it’s possible to suggest three additional specific hypotheses
that will be tested in later chapters. Since the data does not provide an ability to test all
possible implications suggested by the common agency framework, the following hypotheses
are based on those testable implications with the available data. First, based on the common
agency framework, a relationship would be expected to be seen between the executive and

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whether or not they hire a lobbyist to represent the organization before policymakers. For
example, if an executive was significantly ideologically distinct from the median legislator
and super-majority legislator, she might consider hiring a lobbyist to shield herself from a
loss of utility in discussing issues in a policy space much different from her own.
Hypothesis 2A: As the ideology of the nonprofit executive becomes more distant to the
median legislator, the executive will hire a lobbyist to conduct the organization’s lobbying.
Hypothesis 2B: As the ideology of the nonprofit executive becomes more distant to the super
majority legislator, the executive will hire a lobbyist to conduct the organization’s lobbying.
In addition, a few scholars have attempted to measure the relationship between
ideology and advocacy tactics that the organization might choose to use in order to press their
case. McKay (2010) finds that more extreme (and liberal) groups were more likely to spend
more money on campaign contributions to candidates than lobbying expenses. Both of these
tactics, however, can be considered “insider” tactics. Den Hond and De Bakker (2007), on
the other hand, argue that organization ideology is a factor in how activist groups organize
and advance corporate social justice campaigns. They suggest that more extreme, or radical
groups, use different arguments and tactics and use their constituents differently than
moderate, or reformist organizations. Following their logic, more moderate groups use more
constituent support than radical groups, and radical groups may seek tactics that attempt to
economically damage corporations. Fitzgerald and Rogers (2005) theorize that radical social
movement organizations use what could be considered more outsider tactics than insider
tactics. However, none of these works have studied groups from the individual level of
decision-making, and few have empirically tested their claims. Therefore, two additional
hypotheses on tactics can be presented.

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Hypothesis 3A: As the ideology of the nonprofit executive becomes more distant from the
median legislator, the executive will opt for outsider (more radical) advocacy tactics over
insider tactics.
Hypothesis 3B: As the ideology of the nonprofit executive becomes more distant from the
super-majority legislator, the executive will opt for outsider advocacy tactics over insider
tactics.
The common agency framework also argues that as the executive finds themselves
more distant from specific stakeholders, they will opt for ex ante structural controls, such as
having a policy committee to assist in controlling information and the outcomes of policy
debates. This would be done, in large part, to provide a guard against a loss of utility. They
would also be expected to be in charge of managing the choice sets of committee members by
being responsible for producing the initial drafts, or contracting and monitoring outside
experts to provide policy expertise.
Hypothesis 4A: As the ideology of the nonprofit executive becomes more distant from the
median legislator, the executive will use a policy committee.
Hypothesis 4B: As the ideology of the nonprofit executive becomes more distant from the
super-majority legislator.
Hypotheses 2A, 2B and 4A and 4B suggest a positive relationship between
ideological distance between the median and super-majority members and the addition of
specific structural elements as suggested by the common agency framework. Hypotheses 3A
and 3B suggest a positive relationship between ideological extremism and the use of outsider
advocacy tactics, although the literature has not yet systematically tested this relationship.
Organization Members and Volunteers

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Finally, it’s important to consider the role of volunteers and members in a nonprofit
advocacy organization. Without members and volunteers, a nonprofit advocacy organization
is unlikely to be successful in achieving its policy preferences. Nonprofit executives,
therefore, can be seen as accountable to these groups, especially if the organization receives
large institutional gifts, including grants or contracts, or significant support from patrons
(those individuals who give large donations to the organization) (Oster 1995; Walker 1991).
Additionally, 501(c)(4) organizations are unable to attract tax-deductible donations from their
supporters, and are generally not eligible for grants or contracts since they primarily focus on
advocacy or other social welfare activities. This increases the importance of donors and
volunteers among these particular organizations, and their influence over decision making in
the group. Members and volunteers can also monitor the executive and issue warnings or
provide public protest if the organization runs too far afoul of the perceived mission of the
group (think of the recent controversy surrounding the Boy Scouts’ inclusion of openly gay
members (Israel 2013)).
The literature on group formation is also concerned about the role of organizations in
maintaining their supporters over time. As Chong (1991) argues, if the difference between a
policy preference and existing policy is narrow, individuals will drift away. Salisbury (1969)
and Olson (1965) argue that if benefits are not adequate for supporters, individuals will drift
away from the organization. In each of these scenarios, there is an important role for the
executive to manage the process of identifying and providing the appropriate benefits to
members and supporters and managing the organization’s direction (1988; Salisbury 1969;
Hansen 1985). Rather than providing tangible benefits, however, one key benefit that
nonprofit advocacy groups can offer is information to their membership and potential
membership. This saves the member significant cost in becoming educated about all policy
alternatives and voting record of politicians (Young 2011). As discussed above, lobbyists

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can signal to the membership that the issue is not only viable, but that the organization is too
when the lobbyist enters a particular policy debate and can assist with other coordination
problems (Ainsworth and Sened 1993).
In the common agency framework, however, the interests of the two groups – the
executive and members or volunteers – may often conflict. For example, organization
members might like to see the organization’s resources spent on a particular piece of
legislation, but the executive or the Board may not believe that that legislation is worth
spending time on. In Chong’s (1991) description, one would expect that the membership
would be interested in pursuing particular policies that may, in fact, be far outside of the
interests of the executive if he or she wants to be perceived as credible among policymakers.
Rose-Ackerman (1987) describes the tensions between executives and donors resulting in
less fundraising from donors if the executive is able to secure funding from additional
revenue sources, such as government. The members may also be far outside the interests of
the organization’s Board of Directors. However, if the executive’s preferences are more
aligned with volunteers or members, he or she would seek ways to ensure that these groups
have a voice in the decision-making of the organization. Ultimately, as the executive
attempts to congeal these interests into one policy agenda and plan, it will be possible to see
their own interests at play, as they may only provide the members a limited set of actions
from which to choose, or they may make structural changes affecting member involvement
from the decision making process including withholding information.
Hypothesis 5: If the executive is more (less) ideologically aligned with members and
volunteers than other stakeholders, they will embrace internal processes that allow (reduce)
member involvement in the organization’s decision making processes.

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Nonprofit organizations, especially nonprofit advocacy groups, may also feel
accountable to the general public, which includes many potential members and supporters
(Stone and Ostrower 2007). To put it another way, they also consider current free-riders in
shaping their strategy – those that would benefit from any legislative victories, but currently
aren’t supporting the organization’s efforts. Executives consider these individuals important,
because they hope to recruit them to the cause at some point in the future. Indeed, nonprofit
advocacy groups often define themselves as acting in the “public interest”, or seeking public
goods or common goods provision, such as clean air, clean water or civil rights. Kollman
(1998) argues that organizations will cease to be effective when the organization fails to
sufficiently expand campaign’s influence when the opportunity arises. In other words,
nonprofit groups will be weakened by their inability to recruit new members when they have
the chance to do so.
Today, the organization executive has more tools than ever to educate, recruit and
retain members and supporters to the cause. However, this poses a further complication, as
the ease in individual joining or leaving an advocacy group can make coordination problems
difficult for the executive due to the low cost associated with entering or exiting
organizations. The executive is tasked with not only maintaining the existing membership
base, but may also attempt to expand the issue campaign by adding new members. In this
way, the executive can choose recruitment tactics and messages that will grow the
membership base in ways that support their own policy preferences by adding to the
constituencies of those preferred principals. For example, they may select tactics and
messaging that will draw new members from the far ends of the ideological spectrum, or may
instead select more traditional “insider” messages to attract those more in the middle
ideologically.

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Other Principals
While this chapter has primarily focused on the relationship between nonprofit
advocacy executives and their Boards, policymakers and volunteers, the executive also has
other concerns. Executives often have to contend with other stakeholders which aren’t the
focus of this study. For one, most nonprofit advocacy organizations, as well as interest
groups generally, often have to contend with other organizations in the policy arena they are
working in. Sometimes they opt to engage in formal coalitions with these organizations,
sometimes they choose not to. Executives are also concerned about their staff, if they have
paid employees, and their preferences. They might also consider the media, who, like
policymakers, may have information requests of the organization at the same time the
organization is seeking to place stories or shape the debate on an issue in a way that benefits
the organization’s goals. Each of these groups can be seen as asserting their own preferences
on the executive, and may offer different incentives to the executive in turn. The nonprofit
executive then adds these preferences to their overall equation in order to congeal the
preferences of all principals before making a final decision.
Conclusion
This chapter has explored the role of the executive in shaping a nonprofit advocacy
organization. It also discussed the relationship between a nonprofit executive and the various
constituencies (principals) that attempt to control and influence them (the executive), and
have explored how executives will listen to some groups more than others. Specifically, the
interplay between the Board, the executive and policymakers is explored. It would be
expected that executive preferences would have an effect on the direction of the organization,
and the practical implications of these preferences are articulated through the development of
several hypotheses, which will be tested in further chapters. All else equal, an executive
would seek to maximize their own utility as they guide their organization’s tactics and

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strategies. We would expect this behavior to be manifested in maintaining or growing their
own personal prestige or professional opportunities, as well as maximizing the social welfare
their group was formed to support. They can accomplish both of these goals by selecting
various institutional and structural controls that will allow them to favour particular principals
over others, much like Congress will select specific ex ante controls to regulate the behavior
of bureaucratic agencies.

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“I just do what I want.”
- Interview with nonprofit executive, September 2013
CHAPTER 4: THE COMMON AGENCY FRAMEWORK THROUGH CASE
ILLUSTRATIONS

Nonprofit advocacy organizations are very active across the state of California, and
are led by dedicated volunteers and professionals intent on making a difference. Using semi-
structured interviews with several nonprofit executives across California, this chapter makes
use of cross-sectional and comparative case study illustrations to help demonstrate the
implications of the common agency framework in practice. The goal is not to describe causal
relationships between an executive’s characteristics and preferences and decision-making
processes. Instead these case illustrations are offered as suggestive of the outcomes one
would expect to see in these types of organizations based on the theory provided in the
previous chapter. For example, the common agency framework suggests that nonprofit
executives would have a lot more autonomy and discretion in selecting tactics and guiding
organizational strategy than theory has previously suggested. Executives might organize a
policy committee to help manage the flow of information and shield them from a loss of
utility, for example, if their personal and ideological preferences were outside their Board’s
or policymakers. Or, Board members would be expected to carefully consider the
preferences of the organization’s stakeholders in selecting their executive.
This chapter first describes the case selection methodology used for deciding which
organizations were included in the sample of case studies used in the illustrations, followed
by a brief description of each of the organizations that participated. Finally, I apply the case
studies to the common agency framework on leadership in nonprofit advocacy organizations
and find that executive experiences are broadly consistent with the theory. Nonprofit

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executives exhibit, and use, significant discretion in powerful ways when they manage their
organizations.
Case Study Methodology
A case study is an “in-depth study of a single unit (a relatively bounded phenomenon)
where the scholar’s aim is to elucidate features of a larger class of similar phenomena”
(Gerring 2004, 342). Case studies allow the researcher to ask the how and why questions that
are difficult to measure in empirical analysis (Yin 2003), and can provide important internal
validity to a study (Gerring 2007). However, rather than developing a case study of a single
organization, I evaluate several organizations in a cross-sectional, or comparative, approach.
In other words, in the context of nonprofit advocacy organizations, evaluating a small number
of nonprofit executives and their organizations across California may prove suggestive in
understanding patterns that may be evident in the larger universe of executives of advocacy
organizations both in California, and more broadly across the country.
Case Selection
As Gerring (2004) notes, the use of case studies in social science research is about the
case selection as much as the cases themselves. Gerring (2007, 88–90) provides nine
different considerations in case study selection, defined as typical, diverse, extreme, deviant,
influential, crucial, pathway, most-similar and most-different. Each one provides different
perspectives with which to evaluate different variables in the context of a study, and many
case studies may employ more than one of these perspectives in their evaluation (Gerring
2007). This study evaluates the independent variables of executive characteristics and
preferences, including their political ideology, on the strategies and tactics they may employ
in guiding their organization (dependent variable).

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The sample of executives invited for an interview was drawn from a statewide list of
501(c)(4) social welfare organizations that filed Form 990s (IRS revenue and tax form) in
2010 and obtained from the National Center of Charitable Statistics (NCCS). In this way,
they could be considered most-similar, since they each fall into one specific category of
nonprofit organization out of the more than 30 different classifications that the IRS uses for
tax-exempt organizations, including classifications that capture churches, labor unions,
service providers, civic leagues, and the like.
In an effort to include a most-different and diverse perspectives to capture variance
on important variables, a wide range of organizations were selected with differences in size,
geography, ideology and history, at least one group from each end of the (presumptive)
liberal-conservative scale was chosen from the larger sample of nonprofit advocacy groups
across the state. In addition, an effort was made to interview the executive director or Board
chair or president at both small and large organizations. This technique allows for the
elimination of deterministic causes in the outcomes observed (Gerring 2007). In addition, an
approach using diversity among cases is “likely to be representative in the minimal sense of
representing the full variation in the population (though they might not mirror the distribution
of that variation in the population)” (Gerring 2007, 89). A small organization was defined as
having a budget of under $250,000, while a large organization was defined as having a
budget of over $1 million. In small organizations, the Board chair or president can often be
considered the de facto executive of the group in the absence of paid staff.
Care was also taken to select from groups across differing fields of concern and
interest, adding to the most-different perspective. For example, an interview was conducted
with an executive of an organization that engages in local conservation efforts, as well as a
statewide group that focuses on reproductive freedom and women’s health. This is a crucial

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distinction, as it provides a unique opportunity to uncover the similarities and differences
among executives of these groups, despite their issue field. Since the common agency
framework recognizes organizations only along a unidimensional ideological space from left
to right, it allows for organization and strategic variance based on the preferences of the
executive. This is a strength of the multi-case study as well, as it allows to uncover
differences, as well as any similarities between executives of very different types of
organization Indeed, Yin (2003) argues that the multi-case method provides an opportunity
to generate predictions of future behavior (through replication), much like the replication of
an experiment.
In August, 2013, organization executives received a letter inviting them to participate
in an interview (Appendix B), with a follow up phone call and/or email one to two weeks
later. Letters included the study information sheet (Appendix C), which was also provided
again to the participant either before or during the interview (All recruitment materials can be
seen in Appendices B- F). Several groups were not able to be contacted, or were verified as
defunct, and they were removed from the sample and another letter was sent out. In addition
to the interviews, additional secondary data was also obtained for each group, including
evaluating their websites, which included position papers, annual reports, press releases and
action alerts, along with historical information such as annual revenue filings with the IRS
(Form 990, required for all organizations with gross revenues over $25,000 annually). In
some cases, follow up questions were administered by email.
All of the executives had been in their current role for at least two years, with one in
their role for 20 years. Tables 4.1 and 4.2 provide a snapshot of the executives that agreed to
participate and the organizations they represented.

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Table 4.1. Matrix of Organization Size and Ideology
Ideology Size
Conservative group Small (1) Large (1)
Liberal Group Small (4) Large (3)

Table 4.2. Description of Executives and Organizations in Interview Sample
Program Field Ideology
(left-right
scale)
Revenue Geography Position of
Executive
Tenure in
Position
Civil
Rights/Representation
Left <$250,000 SF Bay Area Volunteer Part-
Time/Founder
5 years
Homeland
Security/Defense
Right <$250,000 San Diego Paid Part-Time
(Executive
Director)
3.5 years
Good government Left ~$1,000,000 SF Bay Area Volunteer Full
Time (Board
Chair)
2 years
Women’s Rights Left >$1,000,000 Sacramento Paid Full-Time 20 years
Multi-Issue (Governance,
Tax Reform, etc).
Right >$1,000,000
(when
operational)
Los Angeles Volunteer Part-
time (former
Board member,
org. defunct)

Local Conservation Left <$250,000 San Diego Volunteer Part-
Time/Founder
14 years
Children’s Advocates Left >$1,000,000 SF Bay Area Paid Full Time
Executive
Director
2 years
Multi-Issue (community
organizing, media)
Left <$250,000 Central Valley Volunteer Full-
Time
14 years
Multi-Issue (media) Left <$250,000 SF Bay Area Paid full-time 2 years

Two participants work for organizations that could be considered on the conservative
end of the spectrum (one large, and one small), and six groups that are on the liberal end
(three large, and three small). One executive is a board member of an organization that is
now defunct (a campaign committee to advance statewide ballot measures on key policy
issues). Geographically, four of the organizations are based in the San Francisco Bay Area,

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one in Sacramento, one in the Central Valley, one in Los Angeles and two in San Diego. In
reaching out to organization executives, it became apparent that those organizations that
could be defined as conservative were less interested in participating in an interview than
those that could be described as liberal. However, I did successfully meet with two
organizations that could be described as those more closely aligned with Republicans, or the
right end of the political spectrum.
1

Interview Process
From August to November, 2013, semi-structured interviews were conducted with
seven organization executives in person and phone interviews were held with two. At the
beginning of the interview, participants were again provided with the information sheet, and a
brief description of the study and its purpose was provided verbally to the participants.
Interviews were recorded with the participant’s permission, and interviews generally lasted
from approximately one hour to 90 minutes. One interview lasted for two hours. Interview
questions were based loosely on the survey instrument which can be seen in Appendix A.
For example, conversations started off with questions about the executive’s tenure with the
organization, a description of the organization’s mission, organizational structure and a brief
discussion of the types of issues and tactics the organization used. A table including
questions asked of all interview participants can be seen in table 4.3.
In addition, particular attention was paid to board-staff relationships, the
organization’s decision-making processes, and the executive’s own values, experiences and
perceptions of the organization’s needs. For example, questions such as “How did you get

1
The response rate for conservative organizations was less than 50%. Groups representing a gun-rights
organization, and a pro-life/anti-abortion organization, for example, expressed initial interest, but did not follow
up on confirmatory phone calls. One other organization declined on the phone stating that they didn’t feel
comfortable being under the microscope in the current political climate.

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involved in this work”, “Do your stakeholders disagree? If so, how do you manage that?”
and, “Who develops draft policy positions” were asked.
Table 4.3. Common Interview Questions
Are you the Executive Director of the Organization? What is your title?
Is your position paid or volunteer?
How long have you worked for the organization?
What did you do before coming to this organization?
Please describe your organization's major purpose or mission.
When was your organization founded?
What type of [IRS] determination(s) does your organization have?
Are you affiliated with another organization? If so, how?
Do you have paid staff? How many?
What is your annual budget?
Does your organization currently have members? How many? Do they pay dues?
Do your members support issues or programs? Do they make decisions on issues or tactics?
How many volunteers do you have? What is their role in the organization? Do they make decisions on issues or
tactics?
How many board members do you have?
How would you describe the role of Board members? In making decisions?
What types of advocacy tactics do you use?
Can you describe a recent campaign? What happened?
Can you describe your stakeholders? What happens when they disagree?
Why do you do what you do?
What is the biggest challenge facing the organization? Biggest opportunity?
Note: As semi-structured interviews, the above questions were often followed up with a request for additional
information or examples.
Case Study Summaries
In this section, a summary of participating executives and a description of their
organizations, as provided by the executive, are presented. To provide confidentiality to the
executives that participated, their names are changed in the study, and their organization
names are not included in the case study descriptions. In addition, every effort was made to
remove any information that would allow for identification of the organization. Instead,
organizations are only defined by their broad program or issue category. The organization
summaries are then followed by an exploration of the common agency framework in practice.

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Homeland Security Organization
John is the part-time executive director of a homeland security organization that was
formed in San Diego County in the late 1990s to advocate for a strong defense infrastructure.
It is a small organization; their most recent Form 990 (2012) shows gross receipts of under
$50,000, expenses exceeding revenue and net assets of only about $50,000. They can be
considered to be on the conservative end of the liberal-conservative spectrum, although John
stated that it is a nonpartisan organization. When asked what his political ideology is, he
responded, “not liberal”. The organization’s leadership structure is comprised of
representatives from several states and one part-time Executive Director and a part-time
administrative assistant, and the organization’s funding primarily comes from community
organizations and businesses, although their donors and supporters aren’t considered
“members”.
John sees the organization’s role as one of advocacy and education, although he
doesn’t perceive it as doing a lot of direct advocacy. Instead, the group develops and presents
policy research to decision-makers. For example, the organization contracts for economic or
readiness reports, then looks to make sure that policymakers are informed of the implications
of policy decisions on the local, state and national level to “help decision-makers make the
best decisions”. Although they don’t work formally with the Department of Defense (DOD)
or the Pentagon, they do make sure that their policy positions are consistent with those that
are desired by the DOD. They’ve been involved in campaigns that seek to influence the
decisions made by the DOD, but also engage in litigation on occasion on issues such as the
use of statewide air space.
John has been in his current role for 3 ½ years after first volunteering his expertise
upon retiring from active military service. He sees his role as primarily administrative and
managerial, and defers a lot of the executive decision making to the Board of Directors,

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which does have a policy committee. Despite this, he does oversee the researchers and
contractors, often provides the first draft of policy papers, and makes day-to-day decisions on
behalf of the organization. He described how, although there is often consensus among the
organization’s leadership on specific policy issues, there can be disagreement about what
tactics the organization might use to advance their position.
Good Government Group
Susan is the Chair of the Board of a statewide good government organization, a large
organization on the liberal end of the political spectrum. They are a membership
organization that also receives some revenue from the state to provide voter education and
election information. They are based in the San Francisco Bay Area, but have a legislative
office in Sacramento, have a staff of 5-7 people, and a Board made up of just over a dozen
people. Outside of the statewide grant funding, they are primarily supported by individual
members. Susan described how the organization supports a variety of policy issues, and
engages in a grassroots/bottom-up process for defining and organizing their policy positions.
The organization’s advocacy work is conducted by people who move up the pipeline and are
trained in the methods and processes of the organization. Two staff head up the advocacy
office and work on the organization’s political strategy and analysis. These staff also oversee
the committees that are broken into various issue areas. The organization also has a
legislative committee that votes on the recommendations before the board. Policy
recommendations can come from all levels of the organization, and the organization has a
formal process used to empower their volunteers to bring issues forward and prepare them to
become full campaigns.
Susan’s background is one of continued involvement in the nonprofit sector.
Like most volunteer executives, the president began work with the organization as a

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volunteer, served on a local affiliate’s board after a year, statewide board for four years, and
in the current role as statewide board president for two years. The position, while unpaid,
requires nearly a full-time commitment of her time. She spends a significant amount of time
working with the staff team, as well as other volunteers in the group helping to build
consensus across stakeholders.
Latino Issues Organization
I met with Richard, the Executive Director and founder of a Latino Issues
Organization, by phone. This group can be considered a small liberal organization. The E.D.
provides support on a very part-time basis with no office and no paid staff and it has a small
Board of Directors. The organization has a very specific purpose – support the election of
Latino elected officials. Working in partnership with different organizations, they conduct
voter registration in legislative districts where there is a chance to elect a Latino member.
Over their first six years, they went from "wishful" registration to developing sophisticated
efforts to encourage registration and turnout. The group does not currently have a policy
committee.
The group, although still in existence, hasn’t been very active for the last couple of
years, due to a lack of funds, and there really aren’t any active volunteers. Richard continues
an ongoing conversation with different legislators to identify potential funding, and is
currently spending most of his time working with other organizations. In the past, the money
that supported the group was often spearheaded by prominent Latino election officials and
came from large corporations that wanted to see more Latinos elected to the legislature.
These companies saw this group as a viable group that was efficient and effective in their
work. Richard has spent nearly 40 years in a professional community and has dedicated
much of his adult life to social change, out of sheer belief and commitment. The Board has

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always recognized Richard’s expertise in the field, (he has produced “a lot of results”) and
leaves the day-to-day operations for this group and other, related projects to him.
Multi-Issue Media Organization
I met with Ken at the offices of a youth-led daily newspaper in Northern California,
which is a small liberal organization. Although the paper was formed over a hundred years
ago, it only became an independent and formal organization in the 1970s. They rely upon
individual donations as well as advertising for their paper, and have a circulation of several
thousand. The primary mission of the organization is to educate young people in a “real
world environment”, and their secondary mission is to provide quality news reporting. In
fact, young people run the editorial content of the paper and the organization. Ken’s job is to
manage the business side. The organization employs over two hundred young people at any
given time, of which 70 are paid and the rest are held by unpaid interns and volunteers. The
organization has a Board consisting of 16 people; all but one has worked for the paper in the
past and most have enjoyed successful careers in journalism. Two Board spots are reserved
for young people, including the editor-in-chief.
Four years ago, Ken was brought in as a consultant to help support the (at that point)
ailing organization due to his business background. Although he left after improving the
organization’s financial position, he was brought back by the Board about two years ago after
a leadership transition. At the time of his return, he was only planning to work for the
organization for 18 months, and he has been there for two years. Ken implied that this is
definitely not a permanent job for him, but he didn’t seem to have any immediate plans to
step down. Ken described the decision-making and management of the organization as
chaotic and confusing due to the large turnover of young people, the fact that the volunteer
leadership has a lot of political clout inside the organization, and unclear lines of authority in

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some ways. However, on the business side of the group, he feels confident to conduct
business as he best sees fit.
Community Organizing Group/Media
I met with Robert, the executive of another small liberal organization in California’s
Central Valley, an electorally conservative part of the state. The organization publishes a
monthly newspaper that provides information and news on/for organizations on the far left of
the political spectrum, and they see their mission as being the “voice” of the progressive
community. Robert also sees the paper as a tool to build a stronger progressive movement by
empowering organizations to tell their own stories. Although he doesn’t perceive the
organization as engaging directly in advocacy or policy issues, he does seek to engage in
“education and agitation” on priority issues that people care about. The organization
promotes mostly local issues – since that is where people can do the work, although they do
spend some time working on state, national or international issues.
Born out of a Labor Union newspaper in the mid-1990s, the group started to cover
community activities with a wider circulation in the late 1990s. They incorporated as a
formal nonprofit organization around five years ago. Today, the paper has a circulation of
several thousand with a matching website. Funding comes through annual subscribers, as
well as fundraising appeals, advertising and a few small events. They don’t make enough
money to pay Robert a salary, so he serves in a volunteer capacity and is primarily supported
by a few dozen volunteers, mostly part-time, who deliver the newspaper, report on and write
the newsletters and edit the paper. Their Board of Directors consists of seven or eight people
who serve on the editorial board – which could be considered the policy committee. The
group seeks to make sure that the Board is representative of the community that they
represent – including having a homeless person on the Board.

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Robert has been involved with the group since its founding in 1996, and has been
editor since 1998-99 (which is roughly the time the group left the labor unions and branched
out on their own). He has a high-school diploma, and worked in publishing for the local
mainstream paper before he came to work for the organization. Obviously, he’s passionate
about the work, and is a member of the Green Party and eschews the liberal/conservative
dichotomy and Democrat/Republican. His leadership style is one where he seeks to build
consensus among competing stakeholders in the community. Robert also mentioned that the
Board seems to work best when it represents different perspectives (i.e. homeless, labor, etc.
Rather than supervising Robert, the Board feeds information about the movement(s) to him,
and he assigns out stories. He clearly controls the content of the magazine, and makes the
calls on what is included if there is ever a dispute.
Direct Democracy Group
Karen is a former board member, and early founder, of this now defunct large
conservative organization at her office in Los Angeles. This organization, formed by a
former Governor, was a direct democracy group designed to assist the Governor in
circumventing the legislature by taking issues directly to the ballot through California’s
initiative process. So, in effect, this organization was designed to support statewide ballot
initiatives. In the past, it was involved in bond initiatives, redistricting and tax reform that
the Governor felt was important for the state but couldn’t advance through the legislature.
The organization, which only generally had a small number of Board members at any
given time, had only one staff member. Their role was to assist in setting up the actual ballot
measure campaign and then hiring a campaign director for the ballot initiative. Over the
years, the organization funneled millions of dollars to ballot measure campaigns organized
and supported by the Governor. They provided expertise on polling, media and

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communications, and helped run a full campaign on behalf of the ballot measures. Since the
governor left office, the organization has since disbanded. They chose to disband the group
because, for one, running/fundraising for a group like this and running campaigns is
extremely time consuming, but the other aspect is that like Presidents, former Governors
don’t directly engage in policy debates with existing Governors. As the director describes, it
would be seen as “meddling” in a current Governor’s legislative agenda – and this is
something that isn’t done.
Karen described herself as a registered Democrat, is liberal on social issues, but
conservative on criminal justice issues. She served with the group on a part-time voluntary
basis. She chose her political and charitable projects because she was always looking to give
back and make an impact on other people’s lives, and has been involved in nonprofit
leadership and advocacy since the 1980s. She described the decision-making process in the
organization as a joint effort with the single staff member.
Youth Advocacy Organization
I met with the Executive Director, Janice, of this relatively small liberal community
organizing group that works to “create, opportunity and justice for all families” in the San
Francisco Bay Area. The organization has about nine full-time staff, two part-time staff, an
AmeriCorps staff person and some interns. It also has a Board of Directors made up of
approximately 10 people. It prides itself in taking very limited funds from government
contracts or grants; instead, they receive a significant amount of funding from private
foundations and individual donations. The director describes the group as a “member-led,
intergenerational, multi-ethnic group.” Their members number a “couple hundred” and
active, participating members of about 50-70 members. The members are the individuals that
make the policy decisions for the organization, and then lead the various campaigns with staff

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support. The Board of Directors does have a relatively new policy committee established
under the guidance of Janice, and she is working with this committee and the Board as a
whole to help figure out its role outside of just fundraising for the organization. In other
words, it’s the volunteer-members that make the decisions for the group – both on issues and
tactics.
Janice described the group as a “community based organization”. It works on behalf
of working people and the poor doing organizing and advocacy at the local level through a
grassroots organizing model --- their “members” (community members) select which
campaigns to work on and the positions they take and then run their campaigns. An example
of a campaign the organization works on is around workplace equity and workforce training
issues, and school access issues. The organization does not work much on budget advocacy,
but does monitor budget appropriations for the city’s nonprofit groups that work for children
and youth. Their independence from government funding allows them to be seen as a
“neutral party” in this regard.
The Executive Director has been involved in organizing and activism pretty much her
whole life. She says she followed in her mother’s footsteps, although describes herself as
more “political” than her mother. Before joining the organization two years ago as its
director, she moved to the Bay Area four years ago. She also served as a state legislator in
her home state.
Local Conservation Group
I met with Michelle, the executive of a small liberal conservation group in San Diego
County. She is one of the founders and considers herself the “spokesperson” for the group,
which is a local community group that works to preserve the local, historic area from
development and to protect its open spaces. The organization was founded in the late 1990s

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to fight the development of a conference/retreat center in the area. Initially, the group was
mostly informal, but became more organized after a significant fire swept through the area in
2003. The organization has four Board members besides the spokesperson, four of which are
active members, and one member who isn’t but provides expertise in other ways. Michelle
opted for the spokesperson title instead of President because of the connotation that being a
“president” means. The organization doesn’t have members, but instead has a core group of
about 10 active, regular participants/volunteers. Outside of their core group, they have a
natural constituency of about 100 people, and then the wider community, which they seek to
represent and mobilize depending on the issue.
Since its founding, the group has been incredibly successful in their campaigns. After
a more than decade-long fight, they were able to stop the conference center project that
provided the impetus for their formation. They do basic grassroots advocacy, as well as
testifying before the appropriate panels, including their regional planning council, county
supervisors, Parks and Recreation, and the California Public Utilities Commission. To
generate support for an anti-power line campaign, they “demonstrated” with about 100
people and passed out fliers to locals stuck in traffic going home. That action generated over
500 people who attended a public hearing.
Michelle has been the group’s executive since its founding. She is very aware of how
her supporters and neighbors evaluate her leadership, and has always been very careful to
serve instead of being seen as the “executive”, although she wields most of the influence in
the organization. She also said she knows that she runs a risk by putting her neck out there
and making her neighbors mad (if there are any disagreements), so she is very cautious in
how she does her work and never proceeds unilaterally. She identifies as politically
progressive, or on the far left of the political spectrum.

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Pro-Choice Organization
I met with Marge, the CEO of this statewide organization by phone. This pro-choice
group is the umbrella organization representing various chapters across the state, and is a
large liberal organization. Each chapter pays dues to the statewide organization in order to
provide support for the organization. As such, they provide advocacy, research and support
on behalf of their statewide chapters. Based in Sacramento, they provide the lobbying and
advocacy for reproductive choice in the state legislature, which runs the gamut from
supporting pro-choice bills, to making sure that the “business side” is taken care of (budget
allocations for reproductive health issues, as well as other regulatory issues). They also
provide support for the affiliates by assisting with regulatory oversight and billing issues.
The group’s primary mission is to support family planning issues and reproductive choice.
The organization has 14 staff based in the state capital. The organization was incorporated in
the mid-1970s, and they receive a lot of their funds from individual contributions and affiliate
dues (which the CEO called “voluntary taxes”). The organization has a policy committee,
which Marge has installed during her tenure. Either staff or Board members can bring issues
to the policy committee.
Marge has been in her current role for 20 years. Her position has evolved from
Executive Director to President/CEO over the course of her term. She was the primary
designer of the organization’s advocacy efforts after spending 18 years in a similar role at
another organization, and installed a policy committee under the Board of Directors.
Common Agency and Nonprofit Executives

Previously, this study developed several theoretical hypotheses. Through the
perspective offered by the common agency framework, nonprofit executives are expected to
have more discretion and autonomy in guiding their organizations than extant nonprofit and

84

interest group literature would suggest. In other words, it should be possible to see
executives acting alone in managing their organizations, making the day-to-day decisions of
the organization without significant Board oversight, and having significant control over the
strategic levers inside the organization, such as organizing and leading a policy committee,
empowering volunteers and controlling the information that flows to the Board and other
stakeholders. This fact was clearly articulated by all executive leaders and one Board leader,
with the interesting exception of the two conservative groups. Congealing the often distinct
and conflicting preferences from a diverse set of stakeholders/principals, these executives are
often able to shift the strategy or tactical choices of the organization in their effort to not only
run a successful organization, but to also maximize their own personal utility. Practically,
this means that the executive has significant discretion in managing their organizations as
they see fit with minimal oversight by their Boards. One director flatly stated:
“I just do what I want. The Board is not strong… the business acumen that you would
want to try to balance on a board to some degree is not there at all. Up until we brought [a
new board member] in… he has business acumen, but everybody else, including the CFO,
has none. I get no direction” (interview with executive, September 13, 2013).

While in the following chapters I discuss the empirical results from a statewide survey
of nonprofit executives, this section provides an opportunity to see the theory in action as
executives consider their responsibilities in their organization, their relationships with their
various stakeholders, and the tensions that they face in making decisions. Table 4.4 provides
a typology of the organizations to consider how executive statements are consistent with the
common agency framework and hypotheses. In the table, it is clear that there was unanimous
agreement that the executive has day-to-day authority over the organization, and most leaders
also expressed significant autonomy in how they made decisions, both large and small. All
hypotheses showed strong support in the illustrations, except for hypothesis 2A and 2B,

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which was not directly discussed with the executives, and hypothesis 1, which was not
directly discussed with a few of the executives. This is discussed in further detail below.

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Table 4.4 Typology of Case Illustrations and Common Agency Framework
Executives
Executive
Discretion/
Autonomy
Day-to-Day
Authority
Executive
Selection
(Hypothesis 1)
Tactics/Strategies
(Hypothesis 3)
Has Policy
Committee
(Hypothesis 4)
Empowers
Volunteers
(Hypothesis 5)
John Homeland Security X X X
Richard Latino Representation X X X X
Ken Multi-Issue Media X X X X X X
Robert Organizing/Media X X X X X
Janice Youth Advocacy Organization X X X X X X
Michelle Local Conservation Group X X X X X
Marge Pro-Choice Group X X X X

Board Leaders (Relationship with Executives)
Susan Good Government X X X X X
Karen Direct Democracy X
Note: The policy committee for the two media organizations consists of an editorial board. Robert chairs his, but the editorial board for Ken’s group is chaired by student
leaders.

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The Board of Directors
As discussed earlier, much of the nonprofit literature argues that an organization’s
Board of Directors are responsible for the governance of the organization (Oster 1995;
Ostrower and Stone 2006). Indeed, most governance literature focuses on the Board at the
exclusion of most of the staff. I argue that consistent with Oster (1995), the Board is subject
to its own collective action problem, and is thus prone to capture by the organization’s
executive – especially since the executive is often the individual who controls the flow of
information inside and outside the group or has specific expertise relevant to the decision-
making process. If this was not the case, that is, if Boards were much more in control of their
organizations, and their executives, the executives would have stated that they felt more
constrained by their Board in the decisions they, or other staff, made.
Instead, the executives interviewed in this study, to a person, described broad
authority in the day-to-day decision-making of the organization. While most executives were
careful to describe their relationship with their Board as a partnership, and described
processes of consensus building in making decisions, over and over again executives
described how they were able to control the organization’s decision-making by controlling
the choice sets presented to the Board. They did this by controlling the information that the
board received, including providing drafts of policy papers, hiring and managing consultants,
or having limited overall contact with their Board. For example, one executive, Ken, from
the multi-issue media organization, explained that he was tasked with managing the
development of a strategic plan and was able to secure support for the hiring of a professional
consultant to oversee one area of the plan, rather than have it be led by volunteers.
Another executive, Michelle, stated that her expertise and relationship with the other
board members of the organization is such that she has wide latitude to implement strategies
and tactics that she thinks is best for the organization, without much board challenge.

88

Although she might be cautious in her decision making, her expertise, training and
relationship leaves her in the position where other board members often say “whatever you
think is best” (interview with Michelle, November 18, 2013).
Other executives described their management of the organization as that where they
have discretion to manage the flow of information to the Board by managing the
organization’s consultants, overseeing the development of position papers, or having so much
control over the day-to-day operations of the organization that the Board just doesn’t really
know what is going on. Some executives – both volunteer executives and paid executives --
also spoke of their authority to recommend members as candidates to the Board, or to
assemble their own Boards with their preferred candidates.
It is also possible to look inside the Boards of Directors and their process in elevating
an individual to leadership – whether that is paid staff, or a volunteer chair or president of the
Board. In the previous chapter, it was hypothesized (Hypothesis 1) that Boards select their
executives based on their awareness of other stakeholders, particularly key members of the
legislature. Again, the executive interviews are consistent with this hypothesis. One Board
member, the president of the good government group, stated that her goal in hiring an
executive was to ensure that the organization would maintain its credibility among
stakeholders. She said:
“We’ve been trying to mature our organization… We’ve had a lot of strategic
conversations about how the (organization) is being run, more like a hobbyist, small-scale,
non-professionalized, amateur organization. The nonprofit sector has matured greatly over
the last twenty years….. If we are going to continue to be such a strong force at the state
level, we really had to change our business model: how we get volunteers, what we do, how
we get money, and so, part of that commitment was recognizing that we needed staff that was
at a very high professional level because there are funders, and government people, and other
organizations, even the public, who don’t take us seriously if we don’t have a very strong
executive. So we did, very consciously, I think a really great job of recruiting (their
executive) and shifting our organization quite a bit over time towards being able to work
within that larger picture and with her as a strong executive director (executive interview,
September 13, 2013).

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In other words, feeling pressure from the changing expectations placed on nonprofit
organizations, the Board consciously sought out executive staff that would be seen as
professional and credible among their various stakeholders. Additionally, executives
themselves often articulated that they were chosen, or remain in their positions, due to the
Board’s recognition and respect of their expertise. For example, Ken, the executive of the
multi-media organization, explained how he was brought on since he was good at the
“business” side of the organization and could deal with vendors and the like, as well as bring
a business acumen to assist in managing the student leaders of the group. Michelle, on the
other hand, remained in her role due to wide recognition by her Board that she was the expert
on the issues and could provide the credible voice in dealing with policymakers, while Janice
recognized one of her strengths is the fact that she had been an elected representative herself
and could understand the perspective of policymakers.
In order to properly provide oversight for the Executive or Board president, the Board
of Directors needs to be able to make a significant commitment to working closely with the
executive director. For many Boards, however, this is extremely costly in terms of time and
other resources, such as developing policy expertise, keeping up with the day-to-day demands
of the organization, or keeping apprised of the preferences of other stakeholders. Our Board
president above, in an example of the costs associated with this type of oversight, describes
their thorough process in working with their executive – a process that was unlike any of the
other processes evaluated during the study:
“From a governance perspective, we try to make that happen through the Executive
Director. We do have a [special Board team]; we meet with [the executive] and talk about the
strategic changes that we are making. So, it’s really an opportunity to vet some of the, you
know, how do staff and board relate, or what’s our business model, or how to deal with
partisanship in our organization. So we try to keep it very strategic and not tactical. So we are
now meeting roughly once a month, but definitely before every Board meeting, to review the
agenda to make sure we are staying at the strategic level, not the tactical level… As
President, (the executive) and I meet quarterly to either dive into a particular problem or a

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particular project, or our relationship. And I think that does tend to be more of a president-
E.D. relationship. Because I also serve as a crucial volunteer, I actually meet with (the E.D.)
weekly. But I would say a significant number of those meetings are more on the tactical, day-
to-day, ‘what am I doing as a volunteer’” (executive interview, September 13, 2013).

Most other group executives, for the most part, described Boards of Directors that
were relatively hands-off in managing the day-to-day, or even strategic choices of the
organization. Although most executives do describe some oversight by their Board in
strategic, policy, or tactical matters, and stated that the Board-executive relationship as a
partnership guided more by consensus than hierarchical decision-making, the Board was not
as involved in oversight processes as much as theory would suggest – leaving directors
significant discretion to manage these processes. The extreme case was articulated in the first
part of this section by the executive who stated that he received almost no guidance or
oversight from his Board.
In addition, the common agency framework suggests that if the executive of an
organization finds some distance between the preferences of one set of stakeholders (in this
case, the Board) and their own preferences, it would be expected that they would institute
structural controls to help control the information flow and/or decision-making inside the
organization in order to give preference to either their own interests, or the interests of
another group of stakeholders that they are more aligned with. This question, however,
requires the director to look back through time and evaluate why, or how, they made certain
decisions.
I asked the interview participants how they handled conflict with their various
stakeholders, including the Board, and once again there is evidence to support this
hypothesis: these executives either consciously, or more subconsciously, constrain the choice
set of the organization’s board. Most executives described a conscious effort to build

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consensus among them and their board, but they used interesting tools – often developed with
their leadership – to manage the debate. For example, Marge, the pro-choice executive,
designed the organization’s policy committee, and it is used in the formal decision making
process as the way to legitimize the decisions of the organization. She said if people feel they
are heard in the process, even if the ultimate decision is not what they wanted, they were
much more likely to get behind the final decision. She also described how these processes
helped her not to get too “far ahead” of her Board. Saying, if “I say charge, I need to see if
people are following me” (phone interview with executive, September 16, 2013), she uses the
formal decision making process (which she designed) as the way to earn buy-in and
legitimize the decisions of the organization.
In another example, Janice, the executive of the youth advocacy organization,
mentioned that she has to remember that “Board members are people too” (executive
interview, September 13, 2013), and is currently evaluating ways in which the Board of
Directors can become more actively engaged in this bottom-up organization, including the
formation of a policy committee. Marge, in particular, took this to the extreme. If issues
come up that were outside the organization’s primary mandate, she gets involved in other
activities outside her organizational role, and seeks to be an advocate as an individual, rather
than try to expand the mission of the organization to include these other issues.
Policymakers
Seeking to protect their own professional and personal reputations, nonprofit
executives will carefully protect their credibility with elected officials. As the de facto
spokesperson for their organization, this also has the benefit of maintaining their
organization’s credibility as an information or influence broker in the policy making process

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(Ainsworth 1993; Ainsworth and Sened 1993). In other words, the relationship between the
policymakers and the executive and organization is a two–way street.
Taken together, we can assume that organizations, and their executives, seek
credibility with elected officials as one goal of the organization. As discussed, Boards of
advocacy organizations, in an effort to maintain credibility with elected officials, will
carefully select or elevate an executive that is appealing to the politically pivotal legislators,
which was seen in Hypothesis 1. In the California context, this could be considered the
Governor, as well as the median voter and super-majority member in both houses of the state
legislature. In some regards, this could be seen as an extension of the desire to
professionalize. In addition, policymakers are a key stakeholder and principal that the Board
recognizes in making their selection of an executive to be the “face” of the organization. If
the Board was only interested in hiring an executive that best embodied the Board’s
collective preference, it would be expected that Board members and staff would state that the
organization was best served in the legislature by an executive who was most ideologically
consistent with the mission of the organization.
Instead, we find strong support for Board members (and hypothesis 1) taking the
preferences of the policymakers into consideration. Susan, our Board President above, is
emblematic of that response. Michelle, too, recognizes that her credibility is paramount to
organizational success; she continues to work hard to not only maintain strong relationships
with her Board, but policymakers as well. Janice put it another way. Working to mediate the
relationship between the organization’s members and elected officials, she works hard to
convince her membership not to engage in more confrontational tactics. She said:
“While I love a fight just like everyone else, we have to have multiple tools in the
tool chest. So, making sure that folks keep that in mind… first we have to do this, before we
can just go do that and fight back” (executive interview, September 13, 2013).

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Hypotheses 3A and 3B and 4A and 4B also suggests that executives will select some
tactics or structural elements over others based on their own preferences and the perception of
the preferences of policymakers. More broadly, it can be proposed that this would be the
case with other stakeholders as well, which is further supported by the interviews. If
executives didn’t care about the preferences of the various stakeholders, they would simply
decide based on what they felt was the most effective strategy. However, once again this
implication of the common agency framework could be seen in the interviews. Richard’s
group, the Latino organization, works closely in partnership with elected officials on
particular targeted electoral races around the state. However, not all of the elected officials
would have the same priorities as the organization had, or value the same goals. As Richard
described it, he would see a particular race as important, but the politician might have other
ideas. So, instead of working in an unsatisfactory relationship with a particular elected
official in a campaign, the executive would move on to other officials to see if they were a
better match. Thus, the organization may not have worked on their campaigns they felt
would be the most effective because of a distance in ideology between the two parties.
Members and Volunteers
Much of the collective action and political science literatures are concerned with not
only the formation of interest groups, but also their maintenance. That is, how do executives
maintain their members over time? As previously discussed, this is a particular challenge
with nonprofit advocacy organizations, because unlike most “mutual benefit” groups and
professional associations that can provide direct benefits to organization members, nonprofit
advocacy organizations are generally only able to provide non-excludable benefits to their
supporters – such as a civil rights victory, or cleaner air or water.

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However, organization executives can be expected to leverage these important
individuals (or organizations) in fulfilling the organization’s mission in interesting ways. It
should be possible to see executives leverage their own preference to advance some groups
over others in the decision-making processes of the organization. Hypothesis 5 suggests that
the executive will prefer the involvement of some groups over others based on their own
ideology. If the common agency framework was not consistent with the experiences of
executives, these decisions would likely not be seen as strategic decisions by the executive.
In other words, an executive would not think about how volunteers and members, or their
preferences, fit into the overall strategy of the organization.
This was, however, not the case. I spent a lot of time with the executives discussing
the challenges of balancing various stakeholders of the organization. In order to provide
preference to some groups over others, and increase their influence over the organization,
they were quite thoughtful in how they could expand the organization’s list of supporters or
members. In this way, these executives are subtly guiding the future strategic choices of the
organization by increasing the voice of some constituents over others. Some of the
executives described ways in which they ensured that some groups were given additional
voice in the organization. For example, in the multi-media based organization, the editor
described a process in which he provided for additional viewpoints to be added to the public
debate on a contentious issue:
“In [a recent issue], we had a submission that was very critical of We Steal Secrets, which is
a movie about Wikileaks, Julius Assange, and Bradley Manning. The [organization’s]
newspaper was a co-sponsor of the showing and so the criticism was in part directed at us for
showing the film. The writer thought the movie was not critical enough of the NSA and
spent too much time discussing Assange and Manning’s personal lives. I agreed to run the
article and I invited the primary sponsor of the film … to respond to the criticism. Both
articles were of equal length (more or less) and both writers focused on the issues, rather than
personal attacks. Both sides felt good that they had an opportunity to state their positions, it
was an educational experience for our readers, and debated an important issue… The
[organization] rarely prints articles that target (are critical of) progressive community groups

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or the events they organize. This was an exception to the rule, but I decided to run the
articles because both sides had valid and important points to make and they did it in an
extremely respectful way. The debate gave us all something to think about. We can disagree
and do it in a positive and respectful way” (email communication, September 1, 2013).

In another example, several years ago the youth organization underwent a significant
shift in their governance structure when the previous executive changed the organization
from a primarily top-down hierarchical governance structure, to a bottom-up organization
where the membership plays an important role in deciding on key policy positions for the
group, and takes a lead in deciding campaign tactics as well. Although it wasn’t possible to
interview the individual that oversaw this initial adjustment, it is possible to argue that the
previous executive had an important role in designing and implementing the change. Indeed,
the current executive director described it in such a way as to assume the change was desired
by the organization’s former executive. Interestingly, she is working to shift some of the
power back to the Board, since she recognizes the high level of expertise held by Board
members on their areas of interest which can be of value to the volunteer-led group. As
evidence in support of Hypothesis 5, Janice is helping to guide the process of identifying
ways in which the Board can be more involved in the organization’s decision-making. She
said:
“The board is trying to figure out their role. They actually just started a policy committee,
because we have expertise on the board…They want to figure out how to take what they
know, and also give suggestions and recommendations because they have a different layer of
knowledge, than not just the base, but staff” (executive interview, September 13, 2013).

Ken, the executive for the multi-media organization provides another example of this
dynamic. He personally sees the changing demographics of the community as both an
obstacle and opportunity for the group, and hopes to increase the paper’s, and organization’s,
reach by offering a Spanish language edition. He said:

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“I think the biggest opportunity right now is that…. the demographics [of the
community], half of [the city] is Latino now; a lot of people don’t speak English. To expand
into that area, we need to have a Spanish language section that is enough to get people
interested and supporting it, but then it’s hard to do too much of that because we’re not
getting any revenue for it, at least at first, and so there’s this whole opportunity then to grow
into this huge demographic that we need, and we are, developing a strategy around it…. If
we can show people that the majority, the overwhelming majority, of [the city] is progressive,
or liberal, and that we just need to get people to vote, to participate, that so many things
would change. Getting progressive groups on board with that too, is not the least of our
challenges because they are so focused on their single issue. If we’re successful, we could
dramatically increase our circulation and get our message out to a lot more people” (interview
with executive, August 23, 2013).

Conclusion
This chapter provided an opportunity to see the common agency framework in
practice through the use of case illustrations developed from interviews with the executives
of nine nonprofit organizations across the state of California. Looking to understand both the
how and why (Yin 2003) of various mechanisms and the incentives offered to the executive
which is suggested by theory, interview participants provided a window into how they see
their role in guiding their organizations. The opinions, perceptions and behaviors of these
executives are consistent with the common agency framework provided, and paint a picture
of executives that have wide discretion to make both strategic and tactical decisions on behalf
of their organizations, actions that also serve the interests (and experiences) of the executives
themselves. In fact, in reviewing table 4.4, the presented hypotheses are supported by the
conducted interviews. While these interviews aren’t able to demonstrate causal relationships
between the variables of interest presented in the theory and hypotheses, they can be seen as
illustrative of the types of outcomes suggested by the common agency framework. In
addition, they also are the foundation of a research agenda that seeks to understand the role of
nonprofit executives in the strategic management of their organizations. By expanding the
number of organizations studied qualitatively, it might also be possible to generate enough
data for statistical tests. At least, future interviews will assist in delving even deeper in the

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thought processes of executives and Board members in the governance of their groups. In the
following chapters, I also provide empirical tests of the hypotheses through results gleaned
from a statewide survey of nonprofit executives.

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CHAPTER 5: A CALIFORNIA SURVEY OF NONPROFIT EXECUTIVES, DATA
AND METHODS

The case illustrations in the previous chapter provided an opportunity to see elements
of the common agency framework in practice, as nonprofit executives grapple with the day-
to-day decisions and long-term strategic thinking for their organizations. However, this study
also makes use of a statewide survey of California nonprofit executives, which allows the
opportunity to empirically measure the relationship between executive characteristics and
variables of interest. This chapter provides the specifics of the statewide survey, discussing
the techniques used to develop the survey instrument, sampling frame and known limitations
of the data. It is then followed by a description of the data that was collected and the
measurement techniques used to develop the variables of interest.
Survey Instrument
During the spring and summer of 2013, a survey instrument was designed (Appendix
A). It consisted of 86 questions designed to capture information about the organization,
executive characteristics and preferences, organizational structure and advocacy tactics. The
first section of the survey included questions about the executive’s tenure with the
organization, followed by a set of questions about their political ideology. That was followed
by a series of questions about the organization, and its history, including questions on the
organization’s structure, use of volunteers and financial resources. The bulk of these
questions were derived from a survey instrument used by Child and Gronbjerg (2007).
Interspersed with these questions, I included a set of advocacy activities, based on Kollman’s
(1998) list of activities that an organization might engage in to further policy or political
goals. The survey was then piloted with a set of graduate students at the University of

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Southern California and the survey was modified based on their recommendations,
particularly in regards to clarity of question meaning.
Sampling Frame
The sampling frame for this study consisted of the Executive Director/CEO of all
nonprofit 501(c)(4) organizations registered in the state of California. If there was no
Executive Director, which is often the case with smaller organizations, the chair or president
of the board of directors was asked to participate. Among small organizations, the chair of the
board of directors is often more engaged in day-to-day management of the organization and
may even serve in the CEO capacity (Brown and Guo 2010). As previously discussed, these
groups are often described as “social welfare” organizations, and fall into a few different
categories. First, many are mutual benefit organizations, such as homeowner’s associations
and employee groups, including retired teachers groups, police officers’ associations and the
like, which work on behalf of a specific group of individuals or other organizations. This
classification also includes some social organizations, such as sports groups or women’s
clubs. Finally, this group also includes organizations that engage primarily in “public
interest” advocacy, such as environmental or civil rights organizations with wide natural
constituencies. The sample includes all 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations currently
operating in California that have filed a Form 990 with the IRS during the most recent fiscal
year for which a full dataset is available (2010). The groups are provided one of 26 program
areas by the IRS which defines them as a particular program area or issue field. For example,
issue fields range from education, to youth development, to religion-related. A list of the
issue fields and their representation in the provided list can be seen in Appendix G.
A list of organizations was obtained from the National Center of Charitable Statistics
during the summer of 2013, and comprised of 3,138 organization records. Since the goal in

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this study was to survey organizations that had a social change mission and engage in
advocacy activities, I attempted to remove as many known groups that have primarily social
or event planning mission. I removed 924 records that had names which included “Rotary”,
“Lions” and “Kiwanis” clubs – accounting for nearly one third of organizations in the
sampling frame that had nearly identical mission statements. I also removed 24 records with
the word “festival” in the name, and three with the word “parade” in the name. This does
have the potential to create selection bias, but it was necessary to narrow the sampling frame
to remove as many groups from the sample that don’t engage in the type of activities this
study is most concerned with. In addition, many of these organizations have nearly identical
mission statements, which could have created significant homogeneity in responses and could
have equally biased results with their similar (almost identical) activities and goals.
Since NCCS data does not include phone numbers or email addresses, I contracted
with ExactData ConsumerBase to append known email and phone numbers, as well as
validate mailing addresses. Of this list, 1882 valid mailing addresses were identified and 417
appended with phone numbers or email addresses (22%). I then manually obtained phone
numbers and email addresses for the remaining 1465 records using their organizational
website or their most recent 990 on file. On the mailing list, I removed those that had been
contacted for interviews, leaving a total mailing list of 1868. The printing company removed
an additional 37 addresses that could not be validated. The total mailing list for a recruitment
postcard totaled 1829. The mailing was processed by a third party vendor on September 18,
and postcards started arriving in mailboxes the last week of September, 2013.
2

Between October 2013 and March 2014, I conducted five rounds of phone calls to the
organizations on the list, seeking to speak with the Executive Director or President. Six

2
All recruitment materials, including letters, the postcard, phone and email scripts can be found in
Appendices B-F.

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emails were also distributed between October and March. During phone calls, it was
determined that 27 organizations were no longer in existence. This was matched with a list
of revoked tax-exempt status by the IRS, where an additional 54 organizations were
identified. In addition, one of the types of organizations, namely Chinese family and
benevolent associations, were determined to consistently have a language barrier making it
difficult to even identify the appropriate person to invite to participate in the survey. These
three groups resulted in 115 organizations being removed from the sampling frame, for a total
sample of 1753.
Limitations of Data
The limitations of NCCS and IRS data has been documented by other scholars (K.
Grønbjerg 2002; Tinkelman and Neely 2011), and these limitations did impact this study as
well. Groups who have gross annual revenues of under $25,000 are not required to submit an
annual Form 990 and thus may be missing from the sample. The sampling frame also does
not capture newly formed organizations, and includes many organizations that have ceased
operations and that could not be verified. It also does not include informal organizations that
have yet to seek official tax-exempt status from the IRS, or those whose applications are
currently being processed. In addition, despite the efforts to remove groups that are primarily
social in nature, the final list is populated with a large number of “social” groups including
clubs and event-planning organizations. A list of the groups that are included in this sample,
along with their primary issue field or program classification (environmental, housing, etc.)
can be seen in table 5.1.

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Table 5.1. Frequency of Groups by Issue Field
Category Frequency Percent Cum.

Arts, Culture and Humanities 112 6.39 6
Education 93 5.31 12
Environment 63 3.59 15
Animal Related 54 3.08 18
Health 44 2.51 21
Mental Health 11 0.63 22
Voluntary Health Associations 7 0.40 22
Medical Research 2 0.11 22
Crime and Legal 90 5.13 27
Employment 37 2.11 29
Food, Agriculture and Nutrition 17 0.97 30
Housing and Shelter 122 6.96 37
Public Safety 65 3.71 41
Recreation and Sports 372 21.22 62
Youth Development 40 2.28 64
Human Services 51 2.91 67
International and National Security 4 0.23 68
Civil Rights, Social Action and Advocacy 44 2.51 70
Community Improvement and Capacity
Building 342 19.51 90
Philanthropy, Voluntarism and Grantmaking 20 1.14 91
Science and Technology 4 0.23 91
Public and Societal Benefit 102 5.82 97
Religion-Related 29 1.65 98
Mutual and Membership Benefit 17 0.97 99
Unknown 11 0.63 100
Note: The issue field code, called the National Taxonomy of Exempt Organizations (NTEE), is used by
the National Center for Charitable Statistics (NCCS) and the IRS. Organizations are classified by IRS
employees when they apply for tax-exempt status based on the organization’s description of mission and
activities (NCCS 2014a).

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Another challenge with the data is that while this program classification is helpful in
determining primary issue field, the classifications are not consistently applied and there is a
mix of organization types that may be found in each group. For example, the housing group
may include homeowner’s associations as well as housing rights groups and low-income
places of residence that are organized as nonprofit organizations. The education category
includes organizations that seek to expand educational opportunities for children, as well as
quasi-government agencies that provide financial management for school districts or city
bond issues. The sports category includes tennis clubs which may not engage in advocacy,
but also gun clubs which do. If these groups engage in no advocacy activities, however, the
responding executive should not respond “yes” to advocacy questions and can be used for
comparative purposes. While this data source is known to be incomplete, and often includes
errors, it is still one of the primary sources of identifying a list of nonprofit organizations in
the United States. State databases are also useful, but pose many of the same challenges with
omitted organizations (K. Grønbjerg 2002). Tinkelman and Neely (2011) also documents
significant errors in NCCS data.
Concerns about nonresponse bias in survey research on nonprofit organizations is also
well documented (Hager et al. 2003). In order to improve the return rate on the survey, I
developed an advisory committee including the Association of California Nonprofit
Organizations (CalNonprofits) and the California League of Women Voters. Logos for these
groups were included on survey invitations -- postcard and email -- and were mentioned in
the phone script. Despite these efforts, several respondents opted not to participate in the
survey because the questions were too political and made them feel uncomfortable or they
perceived the questions to be irrelevant based on their organization’s mission and activities.
For example, the executive of a sports group may not see the relevance of answering
questions on their political opinions. Other executives may have been suspicious of

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answering questioned perceived to be too personal. Finally, despite an attempt to ease fears
regarding confidentiality of the survey results, one group executive was quite suspicious on
the phone and claimed that the results would be used for partisan purposes, while another
executive verbally declined an invitation to participate because of perceived IRS scrutiny of
“conservative” groups.
Dependent Variables
Structural Choices
One dependent variable for this study is the organization’s structural choices. As
explained by the common agency framework, many of the structural choices made by an
organization’s leadership, such as having specific committees made up of board members or
volunteers, or empowering volunteers to weigh in on strategic or tactical decisions, can be
considered ex ante controls that have implications for the strategic choices made by the
group. In this way, leaders can leverage these structural elements to guide the organizations
in the way that best support their preferences. Theoretically, nonprofit executives may also
be expected to choose structural and institutional attributes that will prefer the input (those
that the executive prefers) of some groups over others in the decision-making of the
organization. Information on these choices was gathered in the survey.
The key variables of interest were operationalized by the following questions:
x Does your organization currently have any members (other than board members) that
pay dues or fees? (Yes, and pay fees; Yes, but don’t pay fees; No)
x Does your organization currently have any volunteers (other than board members)
that support your issues or programs? (Yes, No)
x How important are volunteers – other than board members – to the work of your
organization? (Five point scale, “Not at all important” to “Essential”).
x Does your organization promote certain positions on policy or political issues? (Yes,
No)
x Do you promote issues related to the interests of certain groups? (Yes, No)

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x Are your members or volunteers – not including board members – involved in
selecting which [advocacy] techniques you use? (Yes, No)
x Are your members or volunteers – not including board members – involved in
selected the issues you promote? (Yes, No)
x Does your organization have a policy committee, or other similar committee, to
advise or act on policy or political issues? (Yes, No)

Advocacy Tactics
The second dependent variable is advocacy tactics. It was possible to collect data on
the use of various tactics by the organization, which groups often use to support work
towards their mission. For example, some groups hold protests while others hire lobbyists.
Data was collected on an organization’s use of both “inside” and “outside” activities, as
defined by Kollman (1998) and Walker (1991). “Inside” efforts include activities such as
having paid lobbying staff, making lobbying expenditures, distributing campaign
contributions to candidates or making endorsements of candidates. “Outside” efforts include
education and grassroots lobbying activities, such as education campaigns, publishing
scorecards of voting records of politicians, petition or letter writing drives, media campaigns
(such as press conferences, opinion-editorials or advertising), boycotts, or direct action
activities such as protests, marches, rallies or disruptive activities like sit-ins. A third
category, Organizational Maintenance, is also included with items such as “Polling your
Members”.
In his book Outside Lobbying, Kollman (1998) operationalizes this measure in his
study of interest groups through a series of questions. Among a list of organizational
characteristics, he asks “Organizations use many different techniques to try to influence the
government and public policy. For each of the following techniques, I am going to ask you if
you use it: regularly occasionally never” (169), followed by 25 different types of activities

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ranging from “testifying at agency hearings” to “protesting and demonstrating” to “presenting
research results to the media” (169-170).
The survey for this study includes nearly all of Kollman’s original 25 (some out of
date questions were removed, such as using fax machines), and asks a few additional
questions resulting from the rise of new media strategies available to organizations –
including social media and email. Respondents chose between “regularly”, “occasionally” or
“never”. To avoid order effects, especially response fatigue with the long number of specific
tactics (Groves et al. 2004; Schuman and Presser 1996), the tactics are randomly ordered and
change from respondent to respondent. Ultimately there were 31 distinct advocacy
techniques executives were asked about. The full list of tactics can be seen in the survey
instrument, which is located in Appendix A, while a list of the questions categorized by
inside, outside and organizational maintenance characteristics can be seen in table 5.2. An
index of inside and outside lobbying was then generated using a principal component
estimation technique described in the following chapter (Kolenikov and Angeles 2004).
In addition, some of the tactics that offered a way to measure theoretical propositions
directly (such as hypothesis 2 on hiring a lobbyist) were evaluated independently. In other
words, all tactics were included in a measure of inside or outside lobbying, or organizational
maintenance, as can be seen in table 5.2. However, some tactics were used as dependent
variables on their own. For example, the tactic “Hiring a lobbyist from an outside firm (or
contractor)” is included in the “inside lobbying” measure in some models, but was used as a
dependent variable on its own in other models in the following chapters.

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Table 5.2. Inside and Outside Advocacy Techniques
Inside Lobbying
Testifying at agency hearings
Direct personal contact with legislators or their staffs
Making financial contributions to electoral campaigns
Serving on government advisory committees or boards
Adding a lobbyist to your staff
Making financial contributions to initiative campaigns
Testifying at legislative hearings
Filing suit or engaging in some type of litigation
Hiring a lobbyist from an outside firm (or contractor)
Presenting research results or technical information to policymakers
Conducting research on policy issues
Outside Lobbying
Running advertisements in print or televised media about your positions on policy issues
Running corporate boycott campaigns
Making public endorsements of candidates
Urging influential members, other than staff, to lobby public officials directly
Running/leading initiative campaigns
Inspiring letter-writing or petition drive campaigns to public officials
Contributing personnel to political campaigns
Inspiring petition-drives to public officials
Hiring a public relations firm to assist you in your advocacy activities
Holding press conferences to announce research results or policy positions
Talking with the press
Protesting or demonstrating
Presenting research results to the media
Publicizing voting records of lawmakers
Using social media to inform members of positions on issues
Organizational Maintenance
Entering into coalitions with other organizations to advance your policy goals
Engaging in direct-mail fundraising for your organization
Sending newsletters to members to inform them of organizational activities
Polling your members on policy issues
Using print media to attract members
Using social media to attract members
Source: Categorical classifications adapted from Kollman (1998)

First, I conducted a reliability test to determine the Cronbach alpha score of each
advocacy category. The first category, inside lobbying, has 11 items and was correlated with
an overall reliability value of 0.88. The outside lobbying index, with 15 items, had a

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reliability score of 0.917 and the organizational maintenance category, with its six items has a
reliability score of 0.925. A table showing the reliability tests for each item can be seen in
table 5.3. These reliability scores suggest that the items continue to hang together and will be
used to create indexes for inside and outside lobbying used in the following chapters.

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Table 5.3. Item Reliability Analysis
average
item-test item-rest interitem
Item Obs Sign correlation correlation covariance alpha
Inside Lobbying
Testifying at agency hearings 170 + 0.836 0.779 0.134 0.861
Direct personal contact with legislators or their staffs 171 + 0.840 0.777 0.129 0.860
Making financial contributions to electoral campaigns 168 + 0.463 0.383 0.166 0.885
Serving on government advisory committees or boards 172 + 0.686 0.595 0.147 0.875
Adding a lobbyist to your staff 168 + 0.522 0.447 0.164 0.883
Making financial contributions to initiative campaigns 168 + 0.543 0.464 0.162 0.881
Testifying at legislative hearings 167 + 0.852 0.798 0.134 0.859
Filing suit or engaging in some type of litigation 168 + 0.477 0.384 0.164 0.885
Hiring a lobbyist from an outside firm (or contractor) 169 + 0.530 0.446 0.161 0.882
Presenting research results or technical information to policymakers 170 + 0.781 0.707 0.138 0.867
Conducting research on policy issues 167 + 0.784 0.714 0.140 0.867
Test scale 0.149 0.884

Outside Lobbying
Running advertisements in print or televised media about your positions on policy issues 169 + 0.633 0.577 0.126 0.913
Running corporate boycott campaigns 170 + 0.619 0.580 0.131 0.915
Making public endorsements of candidates 168 + 0.657 0.607 0.126 0.913
Urging influential members, other than staff, to lobby public officials directly 170 + 0.714 0.651 0.119 0.911
Running/leading initiative campaigns 170 + 0.756 0.714 0.123 0.909
Inspiring letter-writing or petition drive campaigns to public officials 170 + 0.750 0.687 0.115 0.910
Contributing personnel to political campaigns 169 + 0.512 0.466 0.133 0.917
Inspiring petition-drives to public officials 169 + 0.745 0.694 0.120 0.909
Hiring a public relations firm to assist you in your advocacy activities 168 + 0.516 0.460 0.131 0.916
Holding press conferences to announce research results or policy positions 170 + 0.750 0.706 0.122 0.909
Talking with the press 171 + 0.704 0.632 0.117 0.912

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Protesting or demonstrating 170 + 0.740 0.696 0.123 0.910
Presenting research results to the media 169 + 0.735 0.672 0.118 0.910
Publicizing voting records of lawmakers 168 + 0.705 0.654 0.123 0.911
Using social media to inform members of positions on issues 168 + 0.759 0.690 0.112 0.911
Test scale 0.122 0.917

Organizational Maintenance
Entering into coalitions with other organizations to advance your policy goals 168 + 0.754 0.622 0.239 0.791
Engaging in direct-mail fundraising for your organization 169 + 0.646 0.487 0.267 0.817
Sending newsletters to members to inform them of organizational activities 171 + 0.745 0.589 0.232 0.799
Polling your members on policy issues 168 + 0.710 0.590 0.260 0.799
Using print media to attract members 170 + 0.731 0.596 0.248 0.797
Using social media to attract members 171 + 0.808 0.695 0.222 0.774
Test scale 0.245 0.825

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Independent Variables
The explanatory variables of interest are placed into two categories: executive
characteristics (including ideology), and the resources and capacity of the organization,
which can be seen in table 5.4 along with expected signs. There is a wide literature on the
effect of resources on an organization, suggesting that limited resources place constraints on
an organization’s ability to engage in advocacy and other activities (Smith and Pekkanen
2012; Child and Gronbjerg 2007; Malatesta and Smith 2014). In this study, resources are
measured with information on revenue, expenses and assets. A positive relationship would
be expected between resources and most measures of advocacy and structural elements.
Table 5.4 Control Variables and (expected signs) with dependent
variables
Executive Characteristics
Professionalization** (+)
Tenure** (+)
Ideology** (+/-)

Capacity
Revenue and Assets* (+)
Paid Executive** (+)
Existence of policy/political committee** (+/-)

Other Controls
Issue/policy field (NTEE classification)*
Organization age* (+)
Rural v. Urban^ (+)
Distance to Sacramento ^
Note: Those variables with a * have been obtained from IRS Form 990 data. Those with **
are measured by questions on the survey, and those that were created from existing data are
signified by ^. Those variables with both negative and positive expected signs (+/-) represent
multiple hypotheses where different signs might be expected. Expected signs are explained
with those specific questions. Those with no signs indicate variables where there is no
existing theory on the relationship with the dependent variables, and are primarily used as
controls.

The capacity environment will include variables on the executive’s
professionalization, and board of directors. Professionalization is often defined as
“individuals who derive legitimacy and authority from their formal education and claims to

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specialized expertise” (Hwang and Powell 2009, 268), and the professionalization of staff has
been positively linked to advocacy efforts in nonprofit organizations (Nicholson-Crotty 2007;
Leroux and Goerdel 2009). I measure professionalization of the executive specifically with
survey questions on educational attainment (college or professional degree, etc.), whether or
not they are a volunteer or paid executive and their tenure in their position. Based on existing
theory, a positive relationship would be expected between these professionalization
characteristics and measures of advocacy.
Estimating Ideology
Executive ideology is also a variable of interest in this study. Although ideology can
be measured on multiple dimensions, a single dimension allows executives to clarify and
simplify their message, coordinate activities, reduce information costs on other actors and
provide ideological differentiation among competing interests (Jost, Federico, and Napier
2009). In addition, scholars have recognized that ideology can be intentionally constructed
by political elites in order to influence or control the issues and impose stability and structure
to the debate (see, for example, Layman and Carsey 2002). Interest and advocacy groups
consistently construct and use a left-right scale by rating the voting records of elected
officials, often graphically described as a + or – on a published scorecard with an associated
score between 0 and 100. By describing particular votes in a binary fashion, either correct or
incorrect, it is possible to see a single unidimensional scale. This is consistent with Poole and
Rosenthal’s (1997) findings that most of Congressional politics is best described with a single
dimension. Since nonprofit advocacy groups and their executives are engaged in American
politics, it is useful to measure an executive’s ideology along this spectrum.
In this study, the ideology of nonprofit executives is measured through a set of
questions included in the survey, compared with roll call votes taken on the floor of the

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California legislature, and analyzed through Item Response Theory (IRT). To determine
which questions should be included in the survey, I assembled roll call data for eleven key
votes in the California legislature during 2012, including six Senate bills, and five Assembly
bills (Appendix H). Each of these measures was voted on in both chambers, and I used the
data from the third (substantive) readings in each chamber. These eleven bills were also
selected because they provided a clear distinction between party votes, with Republicans
voting one way and Democrats voting the other. Although some amendments may have been
applied to the legislation, the third reading of each bill provides the closest opportunity to
gauge member support or opposition to the legislation. All members of the legislature voted
on all bills. Since it is necessary to discriminate against “liberal” and “conservative” votes in
order to peg individual legislators (and nonprofit executives) along a single, unidimensional
spectrum (policy space), this does to some degree force a party polarization with the votes
selected.
In order to validate that the specific roll-call votes selected discriminated
appropriately in each chamber, ideology was estimated in each house to reveal
unidimensional ideal points for legislators in a Bayesian framework using the two-parameter
specification in Clinton, Jackman, and Rivers (2004). To identify the models, I selected
strong Republicans and Democrats in each chamber. I then constrained their ideal points to -
1 (=very liberal) and 1 (=very conservative). This is a common strategy in the literature (see
Poole and Rosenthal 1997). In the Assembly, Jim Silva (R- Huntington Beach) and Tom
Ammiano (D-San Francisco) were fixed. Silva is a now former member of the California
Assembly from Orange County in Southern California. He had a lifetime score of 7% by the
California League of Conservation Voters (CLCV 2014a), an environmental group. Tom
Ammiano, on the other hand, was a contemporary and colleague of gay rights activist Harvey
Milk, and has maintained a solidly liberal voting record while an elected official. The

114

Senators selected were Joel Anderson (R-San Diego), who is the state executive for the
American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a staunchly pro-privatization advocacy
organization that seeks to coordinate federal business policy by providing business-written
“model legislation” to state lawmakers (Strauss 2012). Juan Vargas (D-Chula Vista), from
near San Diego, is now a United States Congressman with a lifetime CLVC voting record of
81% (CLCV 2014b).
Estimates in each chamber are based on a thinned chain of every 20
th
observation
from 500,000 iterations of the Gibbs sampler, with 5000 draws excluded as burnin – a total of
25,000 draws for each chamber. The models displayed substantial evidence of convergence
based on trace, density, and auto-correlation plots. In both chambers, less than 10 percent of
Geweke (1992) and Heidelberg and Welch (1983) diagnostic statistics failed to suggest
convergence.
Item Discrimination
The parameters estimated are the ideal points themselves, a difficulty (intercept) α
j

and discrimination (slope) parameter where legislator (or executive) i votes on roll-call j.
The discrimination parameter β
j
captures the weight of change in the probability of voting
yea on a roll call as the member’s ideal point θ
i
moves from liberal to conservative. It can be
modeled as the probability of voting “yea”(Y) on any particular roll call vote:
Yij = β
j
θ
i
+ α
j
+ є
ij

Large discrimination is good and negative values indicate that the roll call proposal is
more liberal, while positive values indicate that it is more conservative. With Democrats in
control of the agenda, it is possible to see the expected negative values. Table 5.5 shows these
parameters for the Senate model while table 5.6 provides the Assembly parameters. Again,

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the two houses were analyzed separately in order to be able to identify adequate item
discrimination between each measure. All votes show discrimination.

Table 5.5. Senate Bill Parameter Results, Key Votes Only (N=40)

95% BCI
Difficulty Parameters Mean [.025 .095]
sb1234
-0.47 -2.19 1.13
sb1172
-0.51 -2.19 1.08
ab1436
-0.55 -2.25 1.05
ab1640
-1.26 -2.73 -0.02
sb95
-1.11 -3.09 0.76
ajr22
-0.59 -2.32 1.08
sb1455
-0.53 -2.23 1.11
sb1066
-0.40 -1.31 0.54
sb1029
-0.52 -2.19 1.15
ab1687
-1.01 -2.48 0.33
ab2296
-0.49 -2.26 1.10
Discrimination Parameters

sb1234
-3.61 -5.77 -1.62
sb1172
-3.66 -5.90 -1.69
ab1436
-3.57 -5.80 -1.63
ab1640
-2.50 -4.23 -1.01
sb95
-2.95 -5.32 -0.93
ajr22
-3.58 -5.87 -1.62
sb1455
-3.66 -5.96 -1.72
sb1066
-2.06 -3.39 -0.94
sb1029
-3.56 -5.77 -1.57
ab1687
-2.77 -4.63 -1.19
ab2296
-3.66 -5.87 -1.66
Note: Shaded areas are not statistically significant

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Table 5.6. Assembly Bill Parameter Results, Key
Votes Only (N=80)

95% BCI
Difficulty Parameters Mean [.025 .095]
sb1234
-0.37 -1.50 0.70
sb1172
-1.31 -2.76 -0.04
ab1436
-0.21 -1.23 0.92
ab1640
-1.09 -2.50 0.23
sb95
-1.91 -3.34 -0.69
ajR22
-1.08 -2.50 0.30
sb1455
-1.75 -3.10 -0.54
sb1066
-1.23 -2.68 0.05
sb1029
-0.80 -2.05 0.46
ab1687
-1.02 -2.48 0.31
ab2296
-0.54 -1.72 0.60
Discrimination Parameters

sb1234
-3.73 -5.77 -1.96
sb1172
-3.97 -6.09 -2.09
ab1436
-3.69 -5.88 -1.86
ab1640
-4.15 -6.28 -2.21
sb95
-2.76 -4.43 -1.34
ajr22
-4.14 -6.31 -2.22
sb1455
-2.97 -4.61 -1.45
sb1066
-4.16 -6.26 -2.26
sb1029
-4.16 -6.27 -2.20
ab1687
-4.04 -6.10 -2.14
ab2296
-3.88 -5.97 -2.04
Note: Shaded areas are not statistically significant

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Item Difficulty/Cutpoint Location
The difficulty parameter represents the influence of the proposal on the probability of
voting yea if the member has an ideal point set of zero (Clinton, Jackman, and Rivers 2004).
In other words, it identifies the location of the proposal on the left-right scale among the
legislators. As proposals move farther away from the legislator’s ideal point, they represent
less utility for the legislator if he or she was to vote “yes”. Therefore, a “no” vote can be
considered a vote for the status quo. Both tables 5.5 and 5.6 show the difficulty parameters.
Statistically insignificant difficulty parameters imply that the cutpoint is near zero.
In addition, the distribution of the ideal points of the elected officials can be seen in
figure 5.1. The figure indicates that, not surprisingly, there is a strong concentration of
Democrats in both chambers of the California legislature as they control nearly 70% of the
seats. Indeed, the medians demonstrate this polarization. The Assembly median for all
members is -0.94. For the Democratic caucus, it is -0.95, while for Republicans it is 1.37.
For the Senate, the median value is -1.04. For Democrats it is -1.05, while for Republicans it
is 1.37. Overall, the full legislator mean value is -.15. For the Democrats, it is -.91 and for
Republicans it is 1.19.

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Figure 5.1. Ideal point estimates for the California Senate and Assembly, key votes only
Estimating Ideology of Nonprofit Executives
In order to determine the ideology of the nonprofit executives, it is necessary to ask
them to take similar “votes” on the same proposals analyzed above. This bridges the
nonprofit executives directly with legislators, and allows for a direct comparison of the
revealed ideology of the executives and the legislators. Survey respondents were asked a
series of eleven questions that were worded very closely to the measures that the legislators
voted on. This, therefore, treats the “yes” and “no” responses by the respondents as if they
were roll-call votes on the floor of the California state legislature. This technique has been
used to measure the revealed ideology among other types of political actors, including agency
heads and the President (Bertelli and Grose 2009; Clinton et al. 2012) and voters (Bafumi and
Herron 2010). A similar method has also been used to measure the ideology of
organizations, usually through the use of published scorecards or vote-rankings of legislators
(Poole and Rosenthal 1997; McKay 2010; McKay 2008), where the positions on specific
pieces of legislation are treated as “votes” and overlaid with the roll-call votes of legislatures.
However, this method can be considered problematic, as only a few organizations use
0
.2
.4
.6
-2 -1 0 1 2
Ideology
Senate Assembly

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scorecards as described by Poole and Rosenthal (1997). In addition, organizations that do use
scorecards tend to only select a few votes that likely assist the organization in painting
legislators as either “friends” or “foes” of their organization, such as votes on gun rights or
the environment. McCarty and Poole (1998), on the other hand, used electoral contributions
by political action committees to measure the ideology of PACs. Not surprisingly, however,
the number of organizations that are able to operationalize political action committees and/or
afford campaign contributions are limited largely to corporate interests and industry groups
(Poole and Rosenthal 1997). The result of these approaches is that it has supported the
assumption that interest groups are extremist organizations that push legislators to
increasingly vote at one end or the other of the ideological spectrum, perhaps against their
own preferences. In fact, Poole and Rosenthal (1997, 183) bluntly state, “In any event, the
ideologically oriented interest groups… are forces of extremism.”
However, this study approaches ideology through a much more direct method:
executives were asked directly for their opinions on a set of roll-call votes in the California
legislature. Since the roll call votes selected likely had little to do with issues their
organizations were concerned with, care was taken to make sure the respondent knew they
were being asked for their personal opinion. In addition, it was not only necessary to choose
from issues that had the requirements needed for successful ideal point estimate of the two
houses of the legislature as described above, but also would be assumed to have some
salience with external political elites, which these executives presumably are. The survey
question started with, “We are interested to know your personal opinion about several key
votes in the California legislature in the 2012 session. Your opinions may or may not be the
same as your organization’s, and may or may not relate to issues your organization is
concerned with. If you were a legislator, would you have supported the following
measures?....”

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x Authorize same-day voter registration in California.
x Approve funds to begin construction of high-speed rail in California.
x Authorize the state to transfer money from internal accounts to the general fund of the
Treasury.
x Expand cash assistance programs for pregnant teenagers through CalWorks program.
x Expand the authority of the State Coastal Conservancy to address the impacts and
potential impacts of climate change on resources within its jurisdiction, giving priority
to projects that maximize public benefits.
x Extend existing fees on smog inspections and sales of vehicle tires that fund
alternative fuel and air quality programs until 2023, and extend grants to owners of
polluting trucks, buses and heavy equipment to help replace or retrofit those vehicles.
x Require that injured workers are provided information on next step options if their
claims are modified, delayed or denied, and authorize the Worker’s Compensation
Appeals Board to award reasonable attorney’s fees to workers that have future
medical treatment that will require legal services.
x Increase disclosures to students by private post-secondary schools, including the
salaries and wages of graduates, the most recent official 3-year cohort default rate for
federal student loans, and whether a program is accredited.
x Prohibit mental health providers from engaging in sexual orientation change efforts
with patients under 18 years of age.
x Request a Constitutional Amendment by Congress to overturn Citizens United, which
allows unrestricted independent campaign expenditures from corporations, labor
unions and individuals.
x Establish a state-run Retirement Savings Trust, which requires employers to offer a
payroll deposit retirement savings arrangement, and requires employees to participate
unless they opt out of the program.

It can be assumed that the executives of nonprofit organizations, since they are
political elites, have opinions on many of the issues before the California legislature even
though they may not discuss them with the legislators, their staff or their members. By
asking them for their opinion on a set of seemingly unrelated issues, it’s possible to measure
their overall revealed political ideology, not just their positions on the issues facing the
organization they work for. In other words, the measure estimates a value for how they view
the world on a left-right ideological scale. Again, the order of the questions were rotated
randomly to avoid order effects (Schuman and Presser 1996; Groves et al. 2004).
Respondents could only choose between a “yes” or “no” answer, although they could leave

121

the question blank if they chose to do so. Findings of the executive ideology are discussed
below in the results section.
Control Variables
It is also important to control for a set of organizational characteristics that vary
across groups. For one, the organization’s issue field is provided by the IRS data obtained
from the National Center for Charitable Statistics, as well as the organization age, whether or
not their address is based in an urban or rural community, their distance to the state capitol in
Sacramento and the organization’s affiliations with other organizational forms (such as a
charitable group or political action committee, or PAC). These are also included in table 5.3.

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CHAPTER 6: ADVOCACY ORGANIZATIONS IN CALIFORNIA

The survey was launched on September 25, 2013 when the postcard was mailed out
directing people to the online survey, and closed on March 15, 2014. Several respondents did
not indicate which organization they worked with, making matching their response to the
sample list difficult. When the respondent’s organization was in doubt, some were able to be
matched by email address. However, fifty-seven groups could not be matched with the IRS
data file since they were completed anonymously without any organizational information
provided. These were assigned a unique identifier for further analysis. Responses for three
executives were determined to be for 501(c)(3) charitable organizations, and thus not eligible
for the study. These were removed from the sample. In addition, duplicate responses were
completed for approximately 20 organizations. This was due to the fact that in some cases, it
appeared that respondents came back to the survey and either completed their original survey
after their first survey had “closed” in the survey software system, or more than one person in
the organization completed the survey. To remove duplicates, I followed the following rules:
x If completed by the same person (same computer IP address and identical responses
to demographic information), I either combined, or deleted response with less answers
to create a full record.
x If completed by more than one person, I removed the response of the respondent that
said that they didn’t have day to day authority in the organization (and the other did).
x If neither appeared to be the ED/director, I deleted the least complete answer.

Ultimately, after ineligible organizations and responses were removed, 259 responses
appeared eligible for a 14.8% response rate. This response rate may not be considered
unusual considering the number of more personal, or sensitive questions, that were asked at
the start of the survey, and may have been exacerbated by the fact that individuals could

123

move back and forth between screens to “look ahead” at questions and determine if they
wanted to answer them. The use of sensitive questions has been found to reduce the response
rate (Groves et al. 2004), which may have affected the response rate here. In addition, among
nonprofit scholars, the response rates have varied dramatically. In one recent study on
nonprofit association volunteers, Gazley (2013) saw a 14% response rate. In addition,
response rates in social science research have been trending downward overall over the past
several decades (Groves et al. 2004; Carley-Baxter et al. 2013; Peytchev 2013; Brick and
Williams 2013), and are affecting research across disciplines.
Sample Analysis
Since observational data is available for most respondents with the IRS dataset, it is
possible to conduct a sample analysis to determine if there were systematic differences in the
response rate based on known organizational characteristics. This is particularly important
because of the relatively low response rate and helped to test for selection bias based on the
sensitive nature of the political questions that were asked in the survey. Creating a dummy
variable for response (response=1), I conducted a logistic regression analysis to test the
probability that an organization would have responded to the survey. Control variables
included data from the IRS Form 990 as provided by NCCS, including the group’s issue field
(arts, civil Rights, education, etc.), the log of total revenue in most recent reporting year, the
log of total assets at the end of the year and the age of the organization (as measured by the
IRS’s ruling date subtracted from 2013). A dummy variable was also created to determine
whether the organization resided in an urban zip code (as determined by the U.S. Census
Bureau, where urban =1), the natural log of the organization city’s population based on 2010
U.S. Census Data, and the distance from Sacramento, the state’s capital, based on zip code.
Since some issue fields might be considered non-political, and assuming the political nature
of some of the survey questions, it would be expected that the issue field might indicate a

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relationship between whether or not an organization responded. An organization’s size too,
might affect response rate because, anecdotally, it was more difficult to reach the executive of
large organizations (I relied upon assistants or other staff to send along emailed request),
indicating a negative relationship between organization size and response.
Results of the sample analysis can be seen in table 6.1 and shows no effects of the
specific issue field in the response rate compared to the “unknown” category of responding
groups, which was held out as the base case. Categories that did not have any responding
groups were also eliminated since they predicted non-response perfectly. However, there was
a significant and positive relationship between being a group located in an urban locality and
responding. Due to the sensitivity of some of the questions, particularly at the start of the
survey, it stands to reason that organizations or individuals that either aren’t political, or were
uncomfortable with the political nature of the questions were less likely to respond to the
survey than those that were. Exploring this data further, it is possible to determine which
categories actually responded to the survey. Some groups did respond at higher rates than
their representation in the overall sample. For example, sports and recreation organizations
comprised of 25% of responding groups, but consisted of 21% of the overall sample. On the
other hand, religion-related groups represented 1.65% of the overall sample, but are slightly
over-represented among respondents at 3%.

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Table 6.1. Sample Analysis of Respondents, Logistic Regression
DV: Response =1
Revenue (ln) 0.041
(0.062)
Assets (ln) 0.010
(0.040)
Age of Organization 0.001
(0.004)
Urban =1 0.419**
(0.190)
Population (ln) -0.001
(0.044)
Distance to Sacramento (ln) -0.014
(0.072)
Arts, Culture and Humanities -0.640
(1.144)
Education 0.004
(1.120)
Environment -0.204
(1.163)
Animal-Related -1.043
(1.286)
Health Care 0.332
(1.157)
Crime and Legal-Related -0.612
(1.159)
Employment 0.319
(1.170)
Food, Agriculture and Nutrition 0.613
(1.242)
Housing and Shelter -0.523
(1.126)
Public Safety, Disasters -0.187
(1.163)
Recreation and Sports 0.341
(1.075)
Youth Development -1.532
(1.473)
Human Services 0.510
(1.132)
Civil Rights, Social Action and Advocacy 0.680
(1.136)
Community Improvement and Capacity 0.101
(1.077)
Philanthropy, Voluntarism and Grantmaking -0.848
(1.478)
Science and Technology 2.027
(1.461)

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Public and Societal Benefit 0.281
(1.106)
Religion-Related 0.706
(1.176)
Mutual and Membership Benefit -0.624
(1.484)
Unknown Issue Field (base case)
.
_cons -2.954**
(1.331)
LL -545.418
N 1608
AIC 1144.836
BIC 1290.17
Pseudo R-Squared 0.036
Percent Correctly Predicted 88.74
White (1982) standard errors in parentheses, *p<0.10, ** p<0.05, *** p<0.01
In addition, as described earlier, there were 57 respondents where the organization
could not be identified and matched with IRS data. However, it was possible to measure
potential differences among these respondents compared to those where the organization is
known. Creating a dummy variable for the observations with missing data (missing = 1), a
logistic regression was estimated using demographic information provided by the
respondents, including their position in the organization (part or full-time, volunteer or paid),
tenure with organization, and their ideological self-identification, political party, ideology,
education and gender. Results from this estimation can be seen in table 6.2, and the only
significant characteristic was gender, suggesting that women were more likely to opt to
remain anonymous than men. In fact, they made up 53% of the anonymous responses, but
only 39% of the responses with group identification.
These results suggest that despite the low response rate, those that responded to the
survey were roughly equivalent to the general population of nonprofit organizations in the
sample. Although it’s not possible to count out selection bias among non-responders, it could

127

be argued that those that were more likely to respond were more similar to the types of
groups of interest in this study (those groups that engage in advocacy or advocacy activities).
Table 6.2. Sample Analysis of Anonymous versus Known Groups, Logistic
Regression
DV: Remain Anonymous =1
Position Type (Paid/Volunteer, Full or Part-Time) -0.151
-0.152
Tenure in Position 0.008
-0.03
Educational Attainment 0.028
-0.142
Gender 1.246***
-0.462
Self-Reported Ideology 0.166
-0.181
Self-Reported Party Affiliation 0.015
-0.249
Ideology 0.351
-0.333
Constant -4.218***
-1.505
LL -76.511
N 206
AIC 169.022
BIC 195.645
Pseudo R-Squared 0.066
Percent Correctly Predicted 86.41
White (1982) standard errors in parentheses, *p<0.10, ** p<0.05, *** p<0.01
Descriptive Statistics of Respondents
The descriptive statistics of the respondents themselves show some interesting
patterns, suggesting that most of the participating executives represented relatively small
organizations, and can be seen in table 6.3. Men were more highly represented in the sample,
with 57% of the respondents, compared to 41% who were female. This runs counter to other
surveys of nonprofit executives. One national survey found that 71% of nonprofit executive
directors were women (Cornelius 2011), but that women were less likely to be leading larger
organizations. Considering that women were more likely to remain anonymous, it is possible
that women were less likely overall to respond to the survey, although there is no theory that

128

suggests whether this might have a positive or negative effect on the overall validity of the
study. Respondents also represent a high rate of education, with 21% reporting a four-year
college degree, and nearly 44% reporting a graduate or professional degree. This is much
higher than the general population of California, where only 30.5% of the population has a
bachelor’s degree or higher (U.S. Census Bureau 2014), but is consistent with Cornelius
(2011) that also finds a well-educated group among respondents. The respondents had also,
on average, been with their organizations and in their leadership positions for a significant
amount of time. The average tenure with their organization was twelve years, with just over
six in their current position. Several executives had been with their organizations for several
decades, with the maximum length of time being more than half a decade at 51 years.
Table 6.3. Descriptive Statistics of Respondents
Freq. Percent Cum.
Gender
Male 130 57.52 58
Female 93 41.15 99
Decline to state 3 1.33 100

Education
Less than High School 1 0.44 0
High School Graduate 4 1.77 2
Some College 28 12.39 15
Two year college (AA) 16 7.08 22
Four year college 48 21.24 43
Some graduate or professional school 30 13.27 56
Graduate or professional degree 99 43.81 100

Tenure at Organization Mean St. Dev Min Max
With organization 12.09 10.19 0 51
In Job 6.42 7.65 0 40

A majority of the respondents were also volunteers rather than paid staff. Nearly 45%
of the respondents reported that their positions were part-time volunteers, with another 13%
acting as full-time volunteers. Thirty-three percent were full-time paid staff, while 5% were

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part-time paid staff. This indicates that a lot of the organizations are volunteer-led groups, in
which it would be expected that the executive authorized to make day-to-day decisions for
the organization is the president or chair, (or sometimes vice-president or treasurer) of the
group. The frequency of the position type can be seen in figure 6.1.

Figure 6.1. Position executives hold in the organization
Descriptive Statistics of Organizations
According to IRS records, the mean revenue of the respondents’ organizations (in
2010) was $577,000, with the median of $110,000. This is in contrast to the sample as a
whole where the mean was $4.3 million, and the median was only $75,259. The mean was
strongly affected by one multi-billion dollar organization in the sample (which did not
respond), but even removing that outlier, the average of the responding groups was still lower
than the average of the group as a whole ($1.3 million). The average age of the organizations
in the sample was 29 years, while among responding groups it was also nearly 29 years.
Descriptive statistics of the organizations in the sample can be seen in table 6.4.

0
50
100
150
0 Paid PT Paid FT Vol FT Vol PT Contract Other
Position

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Table 6.4. Descriptive Statistics of Organizations
Variable Obs Mean Std. Dev. Min Max

Full Sample
Revenue 1,557 4,319,930 115,000,000 -163,662 4,500,000,000
Assets 1,557 5,333,330 71,700,000 -21,654 2,200,000,000
Organization Age 1,546 29.19 18.580 2 88

Responding Groups
Revenue 203 577,392 2,276,729 -12,087 28,000,000
Assets 196 648,2153 52,600,000 0 700,000,000
Organization Age 194 28.706 18.517 2 79
Note: Data on revenue, assets and age obtained from NCCS based on IRS Form 990 data.
According to the respondents, 40% of the organizations engaged in policy or political
issues (answered “Yes” to “Does your organization promote certain positions on policy or
political issues”?), while 60% did not. However, among the groups that said “no”, most
engaged in one or more of the tasks associated with advocacy at least occasionally. For
example, 26 organizations that reported they did not engage in policy or political issues
reported that they testify before agencies occasionally, representing 25% of the “no” group.
Three groups also reported “working in coalitions with organizations to advance policy
goals” regularly, with another 22 reporting they work with coalitions occasionally. These
results suggest that while the executives of many of these groups do not consider their work
as related to “policy or political issues”, many do engage in some form of grassroots
advocacy on behalf of their organizations or constituencies, at least at the local level. Table
6.5 summarizes the percentage of organizations that engage in specific advocacy techniques.
Still, the “never” option was used quite often by most of the groups. It’s clear that
even if groups use one or more of the tactics, they generally don’t use a whole suite of them.
For example, 91% of respondents stated that their group never makes campaign contributions
to electoral campaigns, 88% said they never hired an outside lobbyist or firm, and 76% said
they never organized petition-drives to elected officials. Even some of the organizational

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maintenance activities were not heavily used: 69% of respondents stated they don’t engage in
direct-mail fundraising campaigns (which is a staple fundraising tactic of larger
organizations), and nearly 44% reported not even using social media to attract members.
These results indicate that by and large, the groups comprising the sample are smaller
organizations that likely to do not have the capacity to engage in multiple forms of
organizational tactics.
Table 6.5. Percentage Participating in Specific Advocacy Techniques
Never Occasionally Regularly N
Inside Lobbying
Testifying at agency hearings 52.35 35.29 12.35 170
Direct personal contact with legislators or their staffs 43.86 35.09 21.05 171
Making financial contributions to electoral campaigns 91.07 5.36 3.57 167
Serving on government advisory committees or boards 63.95 26.74 9.3 172
Adding a lobbyist to your staff 89.88 7.14 2.98 168
Making financial contributions to initiative campaigns 84.52 12.5 2.98 168
Testifying at legislative hearings 59.28 29.34 11.38 167
Filing suit or engaging in some type of litigation 77.38 20.24 2.38 168
Hiring a lobbyist from an outside firm (or contractor) 87.57 7.69 4.73 169
Presenting research results or technical information to policymakers 52.94 34.71 12.35 170
Conducting research on policy issues 59.28 30.54 10.18 167

Outside Lobbying
Running advertisements in print or televised media about your
positions on policy issues 84.62 12.43 2.96 169
Running corporate boycott campaigns 92.35 6.47 1.18 170
Making public endorsements of candidates 89.29 7.14 3.57 168
Urging influential members, other than staff, to lobby public officials
directly 61.18 32.35 6.47 170
Running/leading initiative campaigns 82.35 15.29 2.35 170
Inspiring letter-writing or petition drive campaigns to public officials 57.65 31.18 11.18 170
Contributing personnel to political campaigns 92.31 6.51 1.18 169
Inspiring petition-drives to public officials 76.33 18.93 4.73 169
Hiring a public relations firm to assist you in your advocacy activities 88.69 9.52 1.79 168
Holding press conferences to announce research results or policy
positions 78.82 18.24 2.94 170
Talking with the press 38.6 47.37 14.04 171
Protesting or demonstrating 84.12 12.35 3.53 170
Presenting research results to the media 65.09 26.63 8.28 169
Publicizing voting records of lawmakers 85.71 9.52 4.76 168
Using social media to inform members of positions on issues 54.17 27.98 17.86 169

Organizational Maintenance

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Entering into coalitions with other organizations to advance your
policy goals 49.4 33.33 17.26 168
Engaging in direct-mail fundraising for your organization 69.23 17.75 13.02 169
Sending newsletters to members to inform them of organizational
activities 29.24 25.73 45.03 171
Polling your members on policy issues 55.95 36.31 7.74 168
Using print media to attract members 44.12 40 15.88 170
Using social media to attract members 43.86 34.5 21.64 171

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Among the respondents, 97% reported that they have a Board of Directors (which is
required by law), and 71% report using board committees to carry out the organization’s
work. Another 12% stated that their committees were used only for short-term tasks. Thirty-
five percent stated that their organization has a policy committee, and 63% of these groups
stated the policy committee votes on either some (35%) or all (28%) of the policy issues
facing the organization.

Revealed Ideology of Respondents
Using the method described above to measure the ideology of the members of the
California legislature, I first estimated their ideology apart from executives using their
responses to eleven questions based on the eleven roll-call votes in the legislature. This treats
the executives’ responses to the eleven questions as “yea” or “nay” votes on bills. As above,
the parameters estimated are the ideal points θ
i
(their ideology), a difficulty (intercept) α
j
and
discrimination (slope) β
j
parameter where, this case the executive i votes on roll-call j. It is
modeled identically to the legislature as the probability of voting “yea” (Y) on any particular
roll call vote (in this case, the probability of answering “yes” on a given survey item):
Yij = β
j
θ
i
+ α
j
+ є
ij

I first identified one respondent at (-1) and one at (1) based on their responses. The
result was that executive ideology skews slightly conservative with a mean value of 0.121.
For those organizations that self-identify as engaging in policy or political issues, the mean
was -0.027 while for those who report no engagement in policy or political issues, the mean
was 0.198. The item difficulty and discrimination parameters in determining their ideal
points can be seen in table 6.6. As can be seen, the moderating effect of the executive’s
responses to the questions reduces the power of several of the items. However, less than 10%

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of Geweke (1992) and Heidelberg and Welch (1983) diagnostic statistics failed to suggest
convergence.
Table 6.6. Nonprofit Parameter Results (N=217)
95% BCI
Difficulty Parameters Mean [.025 .095]
sb1234 -0.02 -0.27 0.22
sb1172 -0.36 -0.54 -0.19
ab1436 0.1 -0.15 0.35
ab1640 0.34 0.07 0.63
sb95 0.69 0.48 0.91
ajr22 -0.35 -0.54 -0.16
sb1455 -0.47 -0.71 -0.22
sb1066 -0.03 -0.36 0.29
sb1029 0.15 -0.06 0.36
ab1687 -0.63 -0.92 -0.35
ab2296 -0.9 -1.16 -0.64

Discrimination Parameters
sb1234 -1.06 -1.46 -0.68
sb1172 -0.1 -0.32 0.11
ab1436 -1.13 -1.57 -0.72
ab1640 -1.27 -1.79 -0.79
sb95 -0.42 -0.68 -0.14
ajr22 -0.51 -0.76 -0.27
sb1455 -0.95 -1.32 -0.61
sb1066 -1.66 -2.42 -1.04
sb1029 -0.75 -1.06 -0.47
ab1687 -1.15 -1.61 -0.73
ab2296 -0.8 -1.13 -0.46
Note: Shaded areas are not statistically significant

The distribution of executive ideologies for the entire group can be seen graphically in
figure 6.2 and by engaging in advocacy in figure 6.3 with the “lobbying” groups only slightly
to the left of non-lobbying groups. This is surprising, since it has usually been assumed that
the executives of interest groups, along with their organizations, mirror the polarization found
in the overall party system. For example, Poole and Rosenthal (1997) have suggested that
interest groups tend to be more extreme even than the legislatures they are seeking to
influence. Yet these findings suggest that the executives of nonprofit “social welfare” tend to

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be more moderate in their policy positions than the elected officials in the California state
legislature, regardless of whether or not they see their organizations as engaging in policy
positions. This finding is more consistent with a recent finding on the distribution of interest
group ideology by Bonica (2013). He found that the ideology of political action committees
was unimodal, like in the figure 6.2, and centered between the two primary parties.

Figure 6.2 Ideology of nonprofit executives, entire group

Figure 6.3. Difference in ideology based on whether or not their organization engages in policy or political
issues.

0
.1
.2
.3
.4
.5
-2 -1 0 1 2
Ideology
0
.1
.2
.3
.4
.5
-2 -1 0 1 2
Ideology
Engage in policy or political issues Not-Political

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In addition, I compared the ideology measure derived from the eleven survey
questions to two other ideological measures asked in the survey: “Do you usually think of
yourself as a Republican, a Democrat, an Independent, or other?” and “When it comes to
politics, do you usually think of yourself as liberal or conservative?” The second question
allows respondents to choose among seven answers from “Extremely liberal” to “Extremely
Conservative”, with an “I don’t know” option available. As you can see from figures 6.4,
Democrats are to the left of Independents, and Republicans were to the right, and in figure
6.5, as the respondents self-reported ideology moves to the right, so does their ideology score
based on the eleven questions. The only discrepancy is that the moderates are to the left of the
liberals, which can be seen by the dotted and dashed lines, respectively, in figure 6.5. These
are strong checks on the face validity that the items used to measure ideology are consistent
with how these executives view themselves, particularly separated from the legislature as a
whole. Ultimately, these comparisons suggest that the ideology measure seems to tap into the
underlying latent ideology of the respondents.

Figure 6.4 Executive ideology by self-reported party affiliation
0
.2
.4
.6
-2 -1 0 1 2
Ideology
Democrat Republican
Independent

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Figure 6.5. Executive ideology by self-reported ideology
In order to estimate the ideology of the respondents compared to the ideology of the
legislators, which is the value used for analysis purposes in the rest of the study, survey
responses were appended to the roll-call votes in the California legislature. The item
difficulty and discrimination parameters can be seen in table 6.7. This allows for a direct
comparison between the groups, and bridges the executives with the votes of the legislators
(Bonica 2013; Bertelli and Grose 2009; Clinton et al. 2011; McKay 2008; McKay 2010).
Again, it is possible to see the moderating pull of the executives on the overall results,
particularly with the discrimination parameters, which are closer to zero than during the
evaluation of the legislature alone, but still negative and not significant.

0
.5
1
1.5
-2 -1 0 1 2
Ideology
Extremely liberal Liberal
Slightly liberal Moderate
Slightly conservative Conservative
Extremely conservative

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Table 6.7. Combined Parameter Results, Legislators and
Executives (N=337)
95% BCI
Difficulty Parameters Mean [.025 .095]
sb1234 -0.29 -0.59 0.01
sb1172 -0.51 -0.7 -0.31
ab1436 -0.18 -0.48 0.11
ab1640 -0.05 -0.36 0.25
sb95 0.28 0.07 0.5
ajr22 -0.56 -0.81 -0.32
sb1455 -0.75 -1.06 -0.47
sb1066 -0.38 -0.73 -0.04
sb1029 -0.11 -0.36 0.16
ab1687 -0.91 -1.27 -0.57
ab2296 -1.13 -1.48 -0.79

Discrimination Parameters
sb1234 -2.03 -2.63 -1.48
sb1172 -0.96 -1.24 -0.7
ab1436 -2.08 -2.71 -1.51
ab1640 -2.11 -2.76 -1.54
sb95 -1.2 -1.53 -0.89
ajr22 -1.38 -1.76 -1.03
sb1455 -1.77 -2.27 -1.3
sb1066 -2.42 -3.17 -1.69
sb1029 -1.73 -2.2 -1.29
sb1687 -2.07 -2.69 -1.47
ab2296 -1.84 -2.37 -1.32
Note: Shaded areas are not statistically significant
The mean ideology of respondents following this procedure is 0.12, and the median is
0.11 (SD = 0.60). Figure 6.6 shows the mean of respondents by their organization’s issue
field. Again, the values range from liberal on the left end of the scale with values below zero,
to conservative on the right end of the scale.

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Figure 6.6. Executive ideology by organizational issue field
In addition, figure 6.7 shows the distribution of respondents compared to the two
houses of the legislature, as well as where some respondent groups can be found (indicated
by a symbol in the chart). This figure clearly shows that compared to the legislature, which is
polarized among party lines, the executives of organizations are more moderate. Again, this
is surprising although consistent with Bonica (2013), since the executives are found to be
moderate and between the two extremes of the Democrat and Republican legislators in each
house.

Figure 6.7. Comparison of the ideology of Senate, Assembly and nonprofit executives
-.2 0 .4 .6 .2
Ideology
Youth Development
Crime & Legal-Related
Animal-Related
Public & Societal Benefit
Food, Agriculture & Nutrition
Education
Housing & Shelter
Public Safety, Disaster Preparedness & Relief
Community Improvement & Capacity Building
Recreation & Sports
Philanthropy, Voluntarism & Grantmaking
Mutual & Membership Benefit
Health Care
Environment
Arts, Culture & Humanities
Unknown
Religion-Related
Science & Technology
Human Services
Civil Rights, Social Action & Advocacy
Employment
Ideology by Issue Field
Environmental Group
Enviro Group
Gun Rights
Gay Rights
Democracy Group
Tea Party-type Group
0
.2
.4
.6
.8
-2 -1 0 1 2
Ideology
Senate Assembly
Nonprofit

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It is also possible to measure the relative distance from the median legislator in both
houses, where the absolute distance from the executive from the Assembly median is
measured as the absolute distance of |Y
L
– Y
A
| and the distance between the executive and the
Senate as the absolute distance of |Y
L
- Y
S
|. The average distance between respondents and
the median Assembly member was 1.33 and the Senate was 1.27. Similarly, the distance
between respondents and the super-majority member (or the member that provides the two-
thirds majority to override a veto and allow for tax increases) was also calculated. The
average absolute distance to the two-thirds voter in the Assembly and Senate was 0.73 and
0.70, respectively, suggesting that the pivotal voter in both houses was at relatively the same
point. This also demonstrates that the executives are closer to the pivot legislators than the
median legislators. Next, I turn to using these variables to empirically measure their
relationships with each other.

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CHAPTER 7: IDEOLOGY AND ADVOCACY

The determinants of advocacy have been of great interest to scholars studying
nonprofit organizations. As discussed in an earlier chapter, several organizational
characteristics have been found to be related to whether or not an organization engages in
advocacy activities. This study seeks to add to this scholarship by measuring the effect of
individual ideology on the probability that an organization engages in advocacy activities. In
the survey, one question seeks to determine whether the executive sees his or her
organization as engaging in advocacy efforts. The question states, “Does your organization
promote certain positions on policy or political issues,” with approximately 40% of the
respondents answering “yes”. Although many of the responding groups who answered “no”
to this question do engage in specific advocacy activities, they likely do not recognize their
organization as an advocacy or political organization per se. This is possibly due to the fact
that their organization does not necessarily have an explicitly political mission, or that the
respondent may consider politics and political issues as more professionalized lobbying
efforts, or they may consider themselves more an issue education group. However, it might
also be the case that executives were averse to labelling their groups as engaging in policy or
political issues because of the perceived negative connotations that being political might
have. Many nonprofits are nervous about engaging in political activities that might
jeopardize their tax-exempt status (Reid 2006; Jenkins 2006), and although 501(c)(4) groups
have more latitude in this area, the issue may affect self-identification among groups and
executives. This may especially be the case today when there has been increased scrutiny by
the IRS on these types of groups (Firestone 2013; Vest 2014). I will first analyze the group

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of respondents who answered “yes” to this question, followed by an analysis of those who did
not, but still engage in advocacy activities.
The dependent variable in this particular model specification is whether or not they
answered “yes” to the policy/political question, coded as a dichotomous variable. The
explanatory variable of interest is the executive’s ideology of the respondents, as measured
using the technique described in the previous chapters. Control variables included capacity
and professionalization variables available in the sample, including the capacity variables of
revenue and assets, and professionalization variables including whether or not the respondent
was paid, their tenure with the organization and their education level. For additional controls,
the organization’s age, distance from Sacramento, whether or not they were in an urban area,
and the population where their organization is based were also included. To control for
outliers, the natural log of revenue, assets, population and distance variables were used. In
order to control for unobserved heterogeneity, including omitted variable biases, responses
were clustered based on issue field. This adjusts the standard errors and provides robust
results.
Since executives need to be able to work both sides of the aisle in order to pass
legislation and protect it by making sure it’s veto-proof, it would be expected that the
executive would be statistically similar to both the median legislator as well as the “super-
majority” member in both houses, seen in hypotheses 3B and 4B. In a unidimensional space
Krehbiel (2010) contends that it is these “pivotal” legislators who help prevent gridlock in
legislatures, even in a divided government. The location of these pivotal legislators
compared to the policy is crucial. If the pivotal legislators preferences are similar to the
status quo, however, legislation will be blocked. Therefore, the appeal of groups to the
pivotal legislators may have an impact on being able to move legislation forward. Those

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specifications, using the absolute distance from the legislative median and super majority
members, can be seen in models 1-4 in table 7.1. The negative signs for models three and
four indicate that the more the executives move away from the median in the Senate, the less
likely that they are to be leading organizations that engage in policy or political issues, but
the more that they move away from the super majority members in both chambers, who are
conservative, the more likely they are to engage in advocacy. These relationships can be seen
for the Senate models in Figures 7.1 and 7.2. This suggests that there might be a “sweet
spot” in the relationship between executive ideology and advocacy. If you are too extreme,
compared to the median legislator, you are not likely to be leading a group that identifies as
engaging in advocacy, but being more distinguishable from the pivotal lawmakers leads to a
higher probability of engaging in policy or political issues. Tenure in position is negatively
related to advocacy as well, which is surprising considering the literature on
professionalization and advocacy.
Another alternative to consider is that, in the California legislature, not as much
power is held with the super-majority legislators as Krehbiel’s (2010) theory might suggest.
For one, both houses have a wide majority of Democrats (for a while, the Senate had a
supermajority of Democrats). In addition, during the 2011-2012 legislative session,
Governor Brown, a Democrat, might have made the need for a veto override unnecessary in
most circumstances. And third, recent voter-approved rule changes eliminated the
requirement that the annual budget be passed by a 2/3 majority in each house in 2010. Only
tax increases and veto overrides still required a supermajority. With little need for a veto
override, and relatively few attempts to increase taxes (since the Republicans simply block
those votes from happening in the first place), advocacy executives do not see a need to
adjust their strategy based on their personal distance from the super-majority member of
either house.

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Table 7.1. Probability of Engaging in Advocacy, Distance from Key Legislators,
probit models (absolute distances)
DV: Advocacy =1
(3)
Senate
Median
(4)
Assembly
Median
(5)
Senate
SM
(6)
Assembly
SM

Distance from Senate Median -0.371***
(0.140)
Distance from Assembly Median -0.369***
(0.140)
Distance from Senate Super Majority 0.466***
(0.133)
Distance from Assembly Super Majority 0.466***
(0.133)
Revenue (ln) 0.091 0.091 0.078 0.079
(0.166) (0.166) (0.164) (0.164)
Assets (ln) -0.119* -0.119* -0.107 -0.108
(0.071) (0.071) (0.073) (0.073)
Organization Age 0.000 0.000 -0.000 -0.000
(0.009) (0.009) (0.009) (0.009)
Paid Executive -0.188 -0.188 -0.186 -0.186
(0.125) (0.125) (0.122) (0.122)
Tenure in Position -0.019** -0.019** -0.020** -0.020**
(0.009) (0.009) (0.009) (0.009)
Educational Attainment 0.009 0.009 0.010 0.010
(0.076) (0.076) (0.077) (0.077)
Urban = 1 0.014 0.015 0.051 0.048
(0.345) (0.345) (0.352) (0.350)
Population (ln) 0.144*** 0.144*** 0.147*** 0.147***
(0.054) (0.054) (0.052) (0.052)
Distance to Sacramento (ln) -0.053 -0.054 -0.052 -0.052
(0.115) (0.115) (0.112) (0.112)
Constant -0.343 -0.322 -1.209 -1.223
(2.123) (2.117) (2.146) (2.152)
LL -85.026 -85.002 -84.734 -84.695
N 142 142 142 142
AIC 192.051 192.004 191.468 191.390
BIC 224.565 224.518 223.982 223.904
Pseudo R-Squared 0.099 0.099 0.102 0.102
Percent Correctly Predicted 70.42 70.42 71.83 71.83
Note: SM = “super-majority”. All models use the preferred, clustered specification on issue field. Distance variables use absolute
differences. White (1982) standard errors in parentheses, *p<0.10, ** p<0.05, *** p<0.01

145

Figure 7.1. Predicted probabilities of engaging in policy/political issues by the executive’s
absolute ideological distance from the Senate median.

Figure 7.2. Predicted probabilities of engaging in policy/political issues by the executive’s
absolute ideological distance from the Senate super majority member.

In addition, tenure in position was significant, and negative. In other words, those
executives who have been with their organizations for longer periods of time were less likely
to identify their organization as engaging in advocacy. Perhaps political organizations have
more executive turnover overall. Finally, the population of the community where the
organization is located was significant and positive, suggesting that organizations that live in

146

more highly populated, urban areas, were more likely to identify their group as engaging in
policy or political issues.
It is also possible to test hypothesis 1 by evaluating how statistically similar nonprofit
executives are compared to both the median legislator and the two-thirds legislator in both
houses. Comparing the ideology of the executives and legislators, along with their and upper
and lower boundaries, this is also true for 70% of the executives compared to the Assembly
median, and 72.3% compared to the Senate median. In addition, executives would need to be
similar to the two-thirds voter in order to overturn a veto, or pass a tax increase if that is their
goal. This is true for 72% in the Senate, and 71% in the Assembly. In other words, the
ideology of the executives is within the upper and lower bounds of the median, or two-thirds
voter of each chamber of the California legislature. The median members of both houses are
strongly left on the unidimensional scale, while the super-majority member of both houses is
on the conservative end of the scale. With the medians and super-majority members being
statistically distinct (there is no overlap between upper and lower bounds of the HPD interval
for the median and super-majority members), this is an impressive feat and demonstrates that
most of the executives are moderate, straddling the two groups of pivotal legislators.
These results are consistent with the earlier descriptive findings above that the
executives of these organizations are to the right of both houses of the legislature, and are
much more ideologically to the center, compared to the legislature. The results also support
the theoretical claim on executive selection. Whether conservatives select-out of leading
these groups, or Boards of Directors are less likely to elevate or hire extremists to executive
positions, knowing that their choice in an executive is less likely to considered credible by the
legislators they are trying to influence. It stands to reason that the executives who self-
identify as leading advocacy organizations are likely to be much more moderate ideologically

147

than the legislators they are trying to influence. Extremists are much more likely to be
leading organizations which don’t necessarily see their work as advocacy.
Ideology and Advocacy Tactics
As previously discussed, the survey instrument asked respondents to identify which
advocacy techniques their organization used. Of the 31 tactics, respondents were asked if
their groups used the technique “never”, “occasionally” or “regularly”. In addition, many
organizations that the executive did not identify as engaging in promoting policy or political
issues still engaged in some of the advocacy techniques. In this section, I evaluate the
relationship between inside and outside lobbying techniques, ideology and other executive
characteristics.
As discussed in the previous chapter, indexes on inside and outside lobbying were
generated using the strategy suggested by Kollman (1998). Since responses were ordinal, an
index of scores for each category and each respondent was created using a polychoric
principal component analysis (Kolenikov and Angeles 2004). The polychoric estimation
method has been found to provide robust estimation result with moderate levels of non-
normality in the underlying latent response variables (Flora and Curran 2004). Following this
estimation technique, each respondent had scores for inside, outside and organizational
maintenance categories, in effect generating new variables. These index variables were then
used alternatively as dependent variables in a set of regression models using ordinary least
squares (OLS). These models were clustered on the issue field, and a dichotomous dummy
variable for whether or not they engage in policy or political issues was included as a control.
The results can be seen in table 7.2. Models 1-4 estimate the relationship between the
distances from the Senate median, the Assembly median and the super majority members of
both houses, on the index of inside lobbying. Models 5-8 estimate the relationship with the

148

outside lobbying index. Note that the distance models use absolute distances from either the
median, or super-majority member.

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Table 7.2 Regression Co-efficients for Inside and Outside Lobbying
DV: Inside or Outside Lobby Index
Inside Lobbying Outside Lobbying
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8)
Senate
Median
Assembly
Median
Senate SM Assembly
SM
Senate
Median
Assembly
Median
Senate
SM
Assembly
SM

Distance from Senate Median 0.318*** 0.318**
(0.108) (0.117)
Distance from Assembly Median 0.317*** 0.315**
(0.108) (0.116)
Distance from Senate Super Majority -0.252 -0.303**
(0.171) (0.134)
Distance from Assembly Super Majority -0.261 -0.305**
(0.168) (0.129)
Engages in Policy/Political Issues 1.811*** 1.812*** 1.805*** 1.807*** 1.814*** 1.815*** 1.813*** 1.814***
(0.177) (0.177) (0.191) (0.190) (0.179) (0.179) (0.182) (0.182)
Revenue (ln) -0.186* -0.186* -0.179 -0.180 -0.096 -0.095 -0.089 -0.090
(0.105) (0.105) (0.111) (0.111) (0.144) (0.143) (0.143) (0.143)
Assets (ln) 0.125*** 0.125*** 0.118*** 0.119*** 0.025 0.025 0.020 0.021
(0.038) (0.038) (0.041) (0.041) (0.057) (0.057) (0.057) (0.057)
Organization Age 0.001 0.001 0.001 0.001 -0.010 -0.010 -0.010 -0.010
(0.004) (0.004) (0.004) (0.004) (0.007) (0.007) (0.007) (0.007)
Paid Leader -0.139 -0.139 -0.139 -0.139 -0.090 -0.090 -0.092 -0.092
(0.118) (0.118) (0.126) (0.125) (0.164) (0.164) (0.173) (0.172)
Tenuer in Position 0.026* 0.026* 0.027* 0.027* 0.021* 0.021* 0.021* 0.021*
(0.013) (0.013) (0.013) (0.013) (0.012) (0.012) (0.011) (0.011)
Educational Attainment 0.008 0.008 0.004 0.004 -0.019 -0.019 -0.022 -0.022
(0.045) (0.045) (0.047) (0.047) (0.043) (0.042) (0.041) (0.041)
Urban = 1 0.338** 0.338** 0.318* 0.321* 0.161 0.161 0.126 0.129
(0.157) (0.157) (0.156) (0.156) (0.237) (0.237) (0.238) (0.237)
Population (ln) 0.104* 0.104* 0.103* 0.103* 0.124** 0.124** 0.124** 0.124**

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(0.053) (0.052) (0.053) (0.053) (0.050) (0.049) (0.049) (0.049)
Distance from Sacramento (ln) 0.010 0.010 0.015 0.014 0.045 0.046 0.051 0.050
(0.090) (0.090) (0.090) (0.090) (0.080) (0.080) (0.080) (0.080)
Constant -3.566** -3.591** -2.982** -2.969** -3.767** -3.792** -3.148** -3.136**
(1.323) (1.325) (1.277) (1.273) (1.462) (1.462) (1.491) (1.492)

LL -149.890 -149.869 -151.393 -151.273 -162.435 -162.438 -163.285 -163.241
N 123 123 123 123 123 123 123 123
AIC 323.780 323.740 326.786 326.546 348.870 348.877 350.570 350.481
BIC 357.527 357.385 360.532 360.292 382.616 382.623 384.316 384.227
R-Squared 0.60 0.60 0.586 0.586 0.545 0.545 0.538 0.539
Note: White (1982) standard errors in parentheses; * p<.10, ** p<.05, *** p<.01. Distance values are absolute distances between the respondent and either the median, or supermajority member. All models used the
preferred, clustered specification.

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As the absolute distance from both the Senate and Assembly medians increase, groups are
more likely to engage in both inside and outside lobbying techniques. The modest magnitude
of change for each point increased in ideology or distance is slightly greater for the inside
lobbying techniques than the outside lobbying techniques. That is, for each point change in
ideology or the absolute distance from the Senate or House median, a group was likely to
have a .32 increase in their inside lobbying score and a .31 increase in their outside lobbying
index score. Since the index ranges from roughly -3 to 3, this means that for every one point
in increase in ideological distance, there is an additional 5% increase in the likelihood of
using inside or outside lobbying techniques.
It’s also important to note that for outside lobbying, the relationship with using these
tactics is significant and negative to the super majority members of both houses, as was seen
in the earlier specifications. However, there was no significant relationship between
ideological distance from the executives and the super majority members for inside lobbying.
Additionally, while engaging in policy issues was obviously significant and positive across
all models, assets was significant and positive for only inside lobbying techniques, and being
in an urban community was only significant and positive for the inside lobbying techniques.
These findings suggest that those groups with more resources (measured in assets) are more
likely to engage in insider lobbying tactics than those with fewer resources. Since this is
inconsistent with Kollman’s (1998) findings that groups with more resources are more likely
to use outsider tactics, it poses an opportunity for additional theory and research on this
question.
Conclusion
Organizations engage in advocacy for a variety of different reasons. This chapter
presented evidence suggesting that executive ideology may have a relationship on whether or

152

not an organization engages in policy or political issues. The results suggest that being
extreme leads to a lower probability of engaging in political or policy issues, and deciding
which tactics to use. While distance from median legislators was negatively related to
identifying your organization as one that engages in policy or political issues, distance from
the legislative supermajority members is positively related to engaging in policy or political
issues, which either suggests that there is a clear “sweet spot” for advocates compared to the
legislature, or that these two members of the legislature are simply not pivotal in the way
theory suggests.

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CHAPTER 8: IDEOLOGY AND ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE

The last chapter sought to uncover the reasons why organizations may engage in
political or policy issues, and specifically whether a leader’s ideology was one of the
important determinants of advocacy. This chapter addresses whether or not executive
characteristics have an effect on the internal, structural choices of the organization, which
may have implications for the group’s strategic choices. In the first section, I measure the
effect of ideology on whether or not an organization has a committee specifically related to
dealing with the policy issues facing the organization, followed by analyzing whether or not
the group opts to hire a lobbyist to support its advocacy efforts. The final section of this
chapter provides some evidence on how and whether a group empowers volunteers to provide
leadership in the advocacy efforts of the organization.
Hiring a Lobbyist

Hypothesis 2A and 2B state that if the ideology of an executive is distant from key
members in the legislature, the executive will seek to have another individual, usually a paid
lobbyist, conduct the face-to-face lobbying on behalf of the organization. This will shield the
executive from a loss of utility in having to discuss policy issues with legislators that they
personally may disagree with. In order to estimate this effect, respondents were asked two
questions about lobbyists in the list of tactics they were provided. They were asked,
“Organizations use many different techniques to try to influence public policy. Please check
if you use any of the following techniques.” Respondents could choose between “Regularly”,
“Occasionally” or “Never”. A dichotomous variable was created to aggregate those groups
that hire a lobbyist at all (coded as “1”) and those that never hired a lobbyist, (coded as “0”).

154

All respondents were included in these models, clustered on issue field. The first item was
hiring an external lobbyist, or “Hiring a lobbyist from an outside firm (or contractor)”. The
second item was adding an internal staff member, or “Adding a lobbyist to your staff. Eight
separate models were estimated, including the policy/political engagement question as a
control. The models dropped those observations located in rural districts since those
predicted failure (or not hiring a lobbyist) perfectly.
Models 1-8 in table 8.1 show the relationship between hiring a lobbyist and the
absolute distance variables between the executive and the legislative medians and super-
majority members. Only the hiring of an internal lobbyist was significant across models 5-8,
but the signs switch between the median and the super-majority members, which was also
seen in the discussion on engaging in advocacy and having a policy committee. While there
is a significant, and negative, relationship between distance from the medians and hiring a
lobbyist, there is a significant and positive relationship between the distance from the super-
majority members and hiring an internal lobbyist. In other words, this again reflects a finding
that there is a narrow ideological window between being too liberal and too conservative and
either engaging in advocacy or hiring a lobbyist to do the advocacy for you. In addition,
increased assets have a positive and significant relationship with hiring an external lobbyist,
and a positive and significant effect for hiring an internal lobbyist, but only relative to the
super majority members in both houses. Population has a negative relationship to hiring an
internal lobbyist, and the distance to Sacramento has a positive relationship to hiring an
internal lobbyist, meaning the further you are from Sacramento, the more likely your
organization is to bring on someone to lobby. Finally, the negative sign for paid staff means
that volunteer executives are less likely to hire a professional, internal staff person. This
intuitively makes sense, if an executive is not paid, it’s not likely they’ll have the resources to
add a paid staff person to do a specific task.

155

Table 8.1. Probability of hiring internal or external lobbyist, distance from pivotal legislators
External Lobbyist Internal Lobbyist
DV: Hiring a Lobbyist = 1
(1)
Senate
Median
(2)
Senate
SM
(3)
Assembly
Median
(4)
Assembly
SM
(5)
Senate
Median
(6)
Senate
SM
(7)
Assembly
Median
(8)
Assembly
SM
Distance from Senate Median 0.031 -0.660**
(0.424) (0.300)
Distance from Senate Super Majority 0.176 1.052***
(0.467) (0.264)
Distance from Assembly Median 0.027 -0.666**
(0.417) (0.288)
Distance from Assembly Super Majority 0.151 1.027***
(0.465) (0.263)
Engages in Policy/Political Issues 2.471*** 2.505*** 2.473*** 2.501*** 2.057*** 2.060*** 2.055*** 2.064***
(0.721) (0.746) (0.726) (0.744) (0.548) (0.552) (0.550) (0.554)
Revenue (ln) -0.136 -0.141 -0.136 -0.140 -0.428** -0.503** -0.433** -0.497**
(0.219) (0.223) (0.219) (0.223) (0.203) (0.196) (0.204) (0.197)
Assets (ln) 0.342** 0.347** 0.342** 0.345** 0.147 0.181* 0.148 0.179*
(0.140) (0.139) (0.140) (0.139) (0.112) (0.108) (0.112) (0.109)
Organization Age -0.012 -0.013 -0.012 -0.013 -0.007 -0.012 -0.007 -0.011
(0.013) (0.014) (0.013) (0.014) (0.015) (0.016) (0.015) (0.016)
Paid Position -0.140 -0.153 -0.140 -0.151 -0.373** -0.409*** -0.374** -0.408***
(0.139) (0.135) (0.139) (0.135) (0.146) (0.141) (0.146) (0.141)
Tenure in Position -0.041 -0.040 -0.041 -0.040 0.001 0.006 0.002 0.005
(0.052) (0.050) (0.052) (0.050) (0.042) (0.042) (0.042) (0.042)
Education -0.123 -0.145 -0.124 -0.143 -0.097 -0.118 -0.100 -0.119
(0.143) (0.152) (0.144) (0.150) (0.107) (0.107) (0.107) (0.107)
Population (ln) -0.044 -0.049 -0.044 -0.049 -0.225*** -0.208** -0.226*** -0.211**
(0.105) (0.108) (0.106) (0.107) (0.087) (0.082) (0.086) (0.083)
Distance to Sacramento (ln) 0.276 0.297 0.276 0.294 0.364* 0.432* 0.366* 0.428*
(0.309) (0.311) (0.309) (0.311) (0.219) (0.230) (0.220) (0.230)
Constant -4.505 -4.517* -4.498 -4.503 4.128 2.673 4.226 2.664

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(3.025) (2.741) (3.034) (2.742) (2.779) (2.888) (2.808) (2.878)
LL -25.140 -25.068 -25.141 -25.088 -23.753 -22.730 -23.652 -22.780
N 100 100 100 100 102 102 102 102
AIC 72.281 72.137 72.282 72.175 69.505 67.460 69.304 67.560
BIC 100.9377 100.794 100.934 100.832 98.380 96.335 98.178 96.435
Pseudo R-squared 0.405 0.407 0.405 0.407 0.357 0.385 0.360 0.383
Percent Correctly Predicted 90 89 90 90 88.24 91.18 88.24 91.18
Note: SM = “super-majority” member. White (1982) standard errors in parentheses; * p<.10, ** p<.05, *** p<.01. Distance values are absolute distances between the
respondent and either the median, or supermajority member. All models used the preferred, clustered specification.

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Board Policy Committee
Hypothesis 3A and 3B state that as the executive becomes more distant from pivotal
legislators, they will elect to use a policy committee. Executives might be expected to make
use of a policy committee to shield them from having to make decisions on policy matters
that they don’t support. Board executives might also institute a policy committee to monitor
an executive they perceive as too extreme for the legislature.
Policy committees are usually made up of a subset of board members in order to
oversee the development and implementation of policy positions and campaigns. To test
whether or not an executive’s ideology has an effect on the formation of a board policy
committee, I generated a dummy variable based on the responses to the following survey
question, “Does your organization have a policy committee, or other similar committee, to
advise or act on policy or political issues”(Y=1). However, it’s important to distinguish
between those groups who stated they engage in advocacy, and those that did not. It stands to
reason that if they answered no to “Does your organization promote certain positions on
policy or political issues?”, they would not find it necessary to establish a policy committee.
Therefore, the models evaluate the relationship between having a board policy committee and
executive ideology only among those groups who stated they engage in policy or political
issues. A probit model was then estimated on four specifications, which can be seen in table
8.2, measuring the relationship between the distance from the median member of the
California Senate and the median member of the California Assembly. All of these models
have been estimated using the preferred, clustered specification on issue field. A positive and
significant relationship is found between the distance from the Senate and House medians
and having a policy committee, and a negative and significant relationship was found
between the super-majority members and having a policy committee. Therefore, as
executives become more distant from the medians, they are more likely to have a policy

158

committee, but the more distant they are from the super-majority members, they are less
likely to have a policy committee. This is consistent with the determinants of advocacy noted
above. In addition, assets were negatively associated with having a policy committee across
models, but the education of the leader was positively associated with having a policy
committee. This second finding is consistent with previous research on professionalization
and advocacy (Hwang and Powell 2009). Both, being in urban and larger communities by
population were also positively associated with having a policy committee.

159

Table 8.2. Probability of having a policy committee, distance from pivotal legislators
(absolute distances)
DV: Policy Committee = 1
(3)
Senate
Median
(4)
Assembly
Median
(5)
Senate
SM
(6)
Assembly
SM

Distance from Senate Median 0.991***
(0.322)
Distance from Assembly Median 0.925***
(0.320)
Distance from Senate Super Majority -0.883***
(0.332)
Distance from Assembly Super Majority -0.888***
(0.333)
Revenue (ln) -0.115 -0.112 -0.091 -0.092
(0.360) (0.358) (0.354) (0.354)
Assets (ln) -0.364** -0.355** -0.362** -0.361**
(0.157) (0.159) (0.180) (0.177)
Organization Age -0.023 -0.022 -0.020 -0.021
(0.019) (0.019) (0.019) (0.019)
Paid Position 0.160 0.151 0.146 0.147
(0.262) (0.255) (0.253) (0.252)
Tenure in Position 0.035 0.033 0.028 0.028
(0.047) (0.047) (0.048) (0.048)
Education 0.311*** 0.298*** 0.276*** 0.278***
(0.097) (0.096) (0.090) (0.091)
Urban = 1 0.951*** 0.959*** 1.006*** 1.002***
(0.309) (0.303) (0.284) (0.285)
Population (ln) 0.187** 0.179** 0.151* 0.153*
(0.093) (0.091) (0.084) (0.084)
Distance to Sacramento (ln) -0.360 -0.351 -0.327 -0.329
(0.315) (0.316) (0.308) (0.309)
Constant 1.999 2.005 3.966 3.976
(4.989) (4.886) (4.963) (4.968)
LL -17.991 -18.137 -18.483 -18.456
N 41 41 41 41
AIC 57.982 58.274 58.966 58.911
BIC 76.831 77.124 77.816 77.760
Pseudo R-Squared 0.332 0.326 0.314 0.315
Percent Correctly Predicted 80.49 75.61 75.61 75.61
Note: SM = “super-majority” member. White (1982) standard errors in parentheses; * p<.10, ** p<.05, *** p<.01. Distance values are
absolute distances between the respondent and either the median, or supermajority member. All models used the preferred, clustered
specification.

160

Empowering Volunteers
Hypothesis 5 states that executive ideology will have an effect on which groups might
be provided more influence over the organization’s internal decision making processes.
Executives who are more ideologically in tune with specific stakeholders will institute
internal structures that will allow preference and additional influence of some groups over
others. Although it is difficult to exactly measure this relationship based on the available
data, it is possible to measure the relationship between the use of some groups in the
organization and executive’s ideology. The survey asked three questions about the influence
of volunteers in the organization. The first asked “How important are volunteers – other than
board members – to the work of your organization?” Respondents could select an answer
based on a five point scale from “Not at all important” to “Essential”. The second two
questions were about the role of volunteers in the organization’s advocacy efforts directly.
The first question asked, “Are your members or volunteers – not including board members –
involved in selecting which [advocacy] techniques you use?” and “Are your members or
volunteers – not including board members – involved in selecting the issues you promote?”
Both of these questions had either a “yes” or “no” response.
I estimated four ordered logit model specifications on the first question using the
absolute distances from the Senate and Assembly median voter, and the absolute distances
from the super majority members in both houses. As table 8.3 demonstrates, ideological
distance to the legislative medians and super majority members are not significant. Nor is the
fact that they engage in policy or political issues. All models were tested using the Brant test
to ensure that they were not in violation of the parallel regression assumption, which found
that no variables were significant (and thus, a violation of the assumption).

161

Table 8.3. Importance of Volunteers to organization, ordered
logit

DV = How Important Volunteers
(1)
Senate
Median
(2)
Assembly
Median
(3)
Senate
SM
(4)
Assembly
SM
Distance from Senate Median -0.250
(0.604)
Distance from Assembly Median -0.256
(0.594)
Distance from Senate Super Majority 0.372
(0.567)
Distance from Assembly Super Majority 0.361
(0.567)
Engages in policy/political issues -0.756 -0.760 -0.778 -0.778
(0.527) (0.529) (0.503) (0.505)
Revenue (ln) -0.252 -0.253 -0.267 -0.265
(0.157) (0.158) (0.162) (0.162)
Assets (ln) -0.020 -0.020 -0.014 -0.015
(0.092) (0.092) (0.095) (0.094)
Organization Age -0.010 -0.010 -0.010 -0.010
(0.015) (0.015) (0.014) (0.014)
Paid Position 0.153 0.152 0.148 0.148
(0.168) (0.168) (0.168) (0.167)
Tenure in Position 0.007 0.007 0.006 0.006
(0.030) (0.030) (0.029) (0.029)
Education -0.078 -0.078 -0.076 -0.076
(0.087) (0.087) (0.085) (0.085)
Urban =1 -0.129 -0.130 -0.103 -0.107
(0.420) (0.420) (0.419) (0.418)
Distance to Sacramento (ln) 0.073 0.074 0.073 0.073
(0.153) (0.152) (0.139) (0.140)
Cut 1 Constant -7.320*** -7.359***
-
6.841*** -6.830***
(1.681) (1.688) (1.908) (1.925)
Cut 2 Constant -5.758*** -5.796*** -5.272** -5.262**
(1.948) (1.946) (2.268) (2.287)
Cut 3 Constant -4.586** -4.624** -4.096* -4.086*
(1.942) (1.940) (2.272) (2.291)
Cut 4 Constant -3.199* -3.236* -2.709 -2.699
(1.907) (1.902) (2.282) (2.302)
LL -153.821 -153.799 -153.657 -153.674
N 117 117 117 117
AIC 335.642 335.597 335.314 335.348
BIC 374.312 374.268 373.985 374.018
Pseudo R-Squared 0.051 0.051 0.052 0.052
White (1982) standard errors in parentheses; * p<.10, ** p<.05, *** p<.01. Distance values are absolute distances between the respondent
and either the median, or supermajority member. All models used the preferred, clustered specification.

162

Next, I estimated the relationship between ideology and the role of volunteers in the
organization’s decision-making on either techniques used or the issues selected. In these
specifications, I also controlled for the importance of volunteers overall in the organization,
whether or not the organization is engaged in political or policy issues and, as before, the
specifications are clustered on issue field to control for unobserved heterogeneity by issue
field. Since no theory to date has been generated to suggest whether or not ideology is a
relevant determinant, or whether the distance from the legislative means is relevant, all three
measures of ideology are estimated. The results can be seen in table 8.4, and show mixed
results.
Models 1 and 2 tell an interesting story. The farther that the executive is from the
median members of both houses of the California legislature, the more likely he or she is to
allow volunteers to select which techniques the organization uses. This can be seen
graphically in figure 8.1 in relationship to the Senate median. This is consistent with
Hypothesis 5, which states that executives will allow some groups more access to decision-
making process as they become more distant from crucial lawmakers. However, no
significant relationship was found between the distances from the super majority members
and selecting techniques, nor was a relationship found between the distance variables and the
selection of issues that the organization works on. In other words, executive ideology and the
distance to pivotal lawmakers is not a significant factor in empowering volunteers to decide
which issues the organization works on is not a significant factor. This finding runs counter
to the Hypothesis 5, and suggests that by and large these decisions stay either with the
executive, or the executive and his or her Board. However, across all models, volunteer
executives were more likely to allow volunteers to make decisions on both techniques and
issues, which makes sense intuitively since executives serving in a volunteer capacity
(usually part-time) are more friendly to other volunteers serving the organization in this way.

163

Looking at it another way, paid staff were less likely to empower volunteers to make these
strategic and tactical decisions.

164

Table 8.4. Probability of Allowing Volunteers and Board Members to Select Techniques or Issues
Selection of Techniques Selection of Issues
DV: Volunteer Empowerment
(1)
Senate
Median
(2)
Assembly
Median
(3)
Senate
SM
(4)
Assembly
SM
(5)
Senate
Median
(6)
Assembly
Median
(7)
Senate
SM
(8)
Assembly
SM
Distance from Senate Median 0.356*** 0.196
(0.137) (0.253)
Distance from Assembly Median 0.353*** 0.183
(0.136) (0.254)
Distance from Senate Super Majority -0.149 0.003
(0.176) (0.284)
Distance from Assembly Super Majority -0.164 -0.007
(0.173) (0.281)
Engages in Policy/Political Issues 0.958*** 0.958*** 0.893*** 0.899*** 0.706*** 0.704*** 0.657*** 0.659***
(0.183) (0.182) (0.182) (0.181) (0.205) (0.203) (0.192) (0.191)
Revenue (ln) 0.153* 0.154* 0.144 0.145 -0.083 -0.083 -0.090 -0.089
(0.092) (0.092) (0.091) (0.091) (0.093) (0.093) (0.099) (0.098)
Assets (ln) -0.063 -0.063 -0.061 -0.061 0.069 0.069 0.067 0.067
(0.059) (0.059) (0.064) (0.064) (0.049) (0.049) (0.057) (0.057)
Organization Age -0.004 -0.004 -0.004 -0.004 0.004 0.004 0.005 0.005
(0.005) (0.005) (0.005) (0.005) (0.009) (0.009) (0.008) (0.008)
Importance of Volunteers 0.203* 0.203* 0.196 0.196 0.180 0.180 0.176 0.176
(0.118) (0.118) (0.126) (0.125) (0.134) (0.134) (0.131) (0.131)
Paid Position 0.370*** 0.370*** 0.359*** 0.360*** 0.248*** 0.247** 0.237** 0.237**
(0.108) (0.108) (0.114) (0.114) (0.096) (0.096) (0.098) (0.097)
Tenure in Position 0.020 0.020 0.019 0.019 0.001 0.001 -0.000 -0.000
(0.014) (0.014) (0.014) (0.014) (0.018) (0.018) (0.019) (0.019)
Education 0.009 0.009 0.000 0.001 -0.023 -0.024 -0.027 -0.027
(0.079) (0.079) (0.083) (0.083) (0.065) (0.066) (0.068) (0.067)
Urban = 1 -0.042 -0.041 -0.040 -0.040 -0.095 -0.096 -0.114 -0.113
(0.213) (0.213) (0.213) (0.213) (0.540) (0.539) (0.528) (0.529)

165

Population (ln) 0.071 0.071 0.064 0.065 0.144 0.143 0.140 0.140
(0.085) (0.085) (0.085) (0.085) (0.109) (0.109) (0.109) (0.109)
Distance to Sacramento (ln) 0.164 0.164 0.168 0.168 -0.044 -0.043 -0.034 -0.034
(0.107) (0.107) (0.107) (0.106) (0.102) (0.102) (0.103) (0.103)
Constant -5.778*** -5.809*** -4.955** -4.956** -3.498** -3.490** -3.048* -3.049*
(1.829) (1.824) (1.962) (1.969) (1.571) (1.559) (1.845) (1.850)
LL -54.255 -54.257 -55.173 -55.141 -56.473 -56.509 -56.809 -56.808
N 96 96 96 96 96 96 96 96
AIC 134.51 134.514 136.345 136.283 138.947 139.019 139.617 139.617
BIC 167.847 167.85 169.682 169.620 172.283 172.356 172.954 172.953
Pseudo R-Squared 0.168 0.168 0.154 0.154 0.138 0.138 0.133 0.133
Percent Correctly Predicted 68.75 68.75 66.67 66.67 67.71 67.71 71.88 71.88
White (1982) standard errors in parentheses; * p<.10, ** p<.05, *** p<.01. Distance values are absolute distances between the respondent and either the median, or supermajority member.
All models used the preferred, clustered specification.

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Figure 8.1. Predicted probabilities of empowering volunteers to select the organization’s advocacy
techniques by the executive’s absolute ideological distance from the Senate median.
Conclusion
The executives of nonprofit advocacy organizations participate in a complex and
dynamic political environment in which they are just one player among many. However, for
many of the executives, their supporters, members, staff and other constituents, these
organizations provide a vital link between voters and elected officials, and the issues they
advocate for are among the top public policy concerns before decision makers at all levels of
government.
Based on a survey of statewide executives of nonprofit advocacy organizations, the
results present relationships between an executive’s distance from pivotal lawmakers and
various choices the organization makes and how it structures itself. A board policy
committee can both shield the executive from making necessary decisions that run against
their personal preferences, or can similarly assist board members in controlling their
executives. Volunteers can be empowered to play a larger role in the decision-making of the
organization, as well, although the findings suggest this occurs in surprising ways.

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CHAPTER 9: CONCLUSION: THE STUDY OF IDEOLOGY AND
STRATEGY GOING FORWARD

The executives of nonprofit organizations engaged in advocacy activities are central
to the American political process. Unfortunately, although there has been significant
theorizing about the role these executives have in forming and managing their organizations,
no one to date has attempted to look inside nonprofit advocacy organizations and attempted
to untangle the incentives executives have to behave, and guide, their organizations in
specific ways. This study sought to do just that: to better understand how executives
consider the choices in front of them, and how their own preferences might affect the group’s
strategic choices. To accomplish this, a new theoretical conceptualization of these executives
was developed using a common agency framework, a theoretical foundation rarely used in
evaluating nonprofit organizations. This was followed by an ambitious mixed-methods study
of nonprofit executives in California where interviews were conducted and a survey
administered to the diverse number of groups that are based in the state. Both the qualitative
and quantitative findings are consistent with the theory developed in this study, and provide
some evidence that an executive’s revealed ideology specifically plays into the management
choices they make in their organization.
This study, however, is not without its limitations. First, the sample selected was of
one particular group of nonprofit executives, those that run 501(c)(4) executives based in
California. These “social welfare organizations” are just one subset of nonprofit
organizations, and this group consists mostly of mutual benefit organizations, and also those
groups that primarily focus on lobbying. While this provides a unique opportunity to study
the incentives available to these executives since their stakeholders are different than, say, a
human services nonprofit organization, many other nonprofit organizations do engage in

168

lobbying at one level or another. It would be interesting to engage with the wide variety of
nonprofit organizations and see if the patterns uncovered here are consistent across
organization type.
Second, the study succeeded in earning a 15% response rate. This is significantly
below the “gold standard” ideal of approximately 50% response rate in order to be able to
have a high level of confidence in the generalizability of the results. The response rate was
the result of the fact that many organizations could not be contacted directly by phone which
proved to be the most effective way to encourage participation. Many organizations did not
have phone numbers, making it difficult to invite them, or determine if the organization was
defunct. Other phone numbers were held by past executives in the organization, who
occasionally were not willing to provide new contact information. Although several attempts
were made to contact executives by email, that too, was problematic. Many emails
“bounced”, and it often could not be verified that the email on record was the correct one to
reach the executive.
However, attempts were made in the study to identify the ways in which the
respondents were representative (or not) of the overall sample, and to control for those
differences. Overall, the group’s size, as measured by their revenue and assets, were not a
significant factor in whether or not the organization responded. The sample analysis of
respondents indicated that urban groups were more likely to respond to the survey than rural
groups. To adjust the standard errors, and control for unobserved heterogeneity between
various issues fields, respondents were also clustered by organization issue field.
In addition, it seems apparent that the study is affected by some selection bias. Due to
the nature of the study and sensitive questions being asked of respondents, there was a fairly
high level of drop-off during the course of taking the survey, resulting in missing data. Other

169

executives may have chosen to take the survey anonymously by not including their
organization’s name, and still others may have evaluated the questions and determined that it
was so distant from their organization’s activities that they decided not to take the survey or
to complete the survey. This was frequently confirmed during phone calls with potential
respondents and email communication from executives. The three most popular reasons
executives said “no” to completing the survey was 1) a lack of time, 2) that they didn’t feel
comfortable with the political questions, or 3) that they didn’t feel the questions, particularly
the ideological questions at the beginning of the survey, were relevant for them or their
group. Although it’s not possible to evaluate the ideology of the executives of the groups that
said “no”, it was possible to evaluate the differences between those groups that the group
name was known, and those that chose to remain anonymous. Results indicate that among
those executives that chose to remain anonymous, the only significant determinant was
gender – where women were more likely to remain anonymous in the survey than men.
Selection bias was also present in the interview process. I was only able to recruit two
ideologically conservative organizations in the study. Many others were asked, but would
not either return phone calls or emails, or decided to say no to an interview request.
Nevertheless, this study is the first of its kind in evaluating the revealed political
ideology of a group of organization executives that has so far remained in the shadows in the
discussion of interest groups and nonprofit organizations, and is just a first step in
understanding these executives, their role in guiding their organizations, and the implications
for public policy. This is no less true due to two recent political trends that will have
significant implications for American elections, and the resulting public policy. First, since
the recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in Citizens United v. the Federal Elections
Commission (2010), interest groups have had an almost unlimited ability to get engaged in
electoral politics. This is particularly true due to a unique loophole in current campaign

170

finance law and nonprofit reporting requirements (Aronsen 2012). In it, wealthy donors are
able to give unlimited contributions to 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations – the very
groups evaluated in this study. Due to IRS regulations, social welfare groups are not required
to publicly report the names of their donors. Although electoral work is regulated for social
welfare groups, they are able to make contributions to “SuperPACs” which do engage in
electoral work. While the initial donation to the nonprofit is not tax-deductible to the donor,
it allows unregulated and invisible donations of cash to flow through to elections without any
transparency. This has, and will continue to have repercussions for elections and public
policy until and unless Congress or the IRS make the relevant rule changes limiting these
types of activities and/or requiring social welfare groups to report their donors by name.
Indeed, 501(c)(4) groups have come under more scrutiny since the 2012 election, with
several right-leaning “Tea Party”- type groups alleging that their applications for tax exempt,
nonprofit status were disrupted due to the political nature of their organizations. Although
the resulting Congressional inquiry has found that this type of application disruption was
evident on both sides of the political aisle (Firestone 2013), it does appear that the IRS is
moving towards more oversight of social welfare organizations, and more regulation of their
participation in electoral work – whether directly or indirectly (Vest 2014).
These trends suggest a need for further study of interest groups moving forward.
Thankfully, this contribution is just a first step in a much broader research agenda on
advocacy and public policy. First, this study, with some additional empirical analysis, is
positioned to become a book on leadership in nonprofit advocacy organizations. For
example, I intend to conduct some additional interviews and surveys of nonprofit executives,
either here in California, or in another state. Conducting interviews in another state would
provide an interesting contrast, and allow for a comparative study of executives working in

171

different political and economic environments. By conducting a comparative analysis, too, it
would allow for additional testing of the hypotheses laid out in this work.
Second, one question remains in this study about the long-term volatility and viability
of the organizations in the sample. It is possible to append additional years of data from the
IRS on the organization’s revenues, expenses and assets to determine if an executive’s
ideology was related to the organization’s stability, or lack of stability, over several years. It
is also possible to determine one measure of an organization’s failure, and that is whether or
not their tax-exempt status is revoked by the IRS, usually for not filing a Form 990 for
several years running (something that has been more aggressively pursued in the last several
years by the IRS).
Finally, as in all studies, more questions are asked than can be answered by the
existing research design. In this work, one area of future inquiry would be to explore more
deeply into the workings of organizations and seek to measure the relationships between
other variables of interest that could not be measured in this design. This might be
accomplished either by interviews, or by a more comprehensive use of a survey instrument.
For example, many of the theoretical propositions laid out in this study relate to the
relationship between the executive, and the Board of Directors. Yet, the research design
offered no opportunity to survey board members. One exciting research opportunity would
be to survey both the Board members and the executive. Armed with ideology measures for
two sets of people within individual organizations, it would be possible to directly test the
aforementioned “ally principle”, that is, whether or not board members were more likely to
elevate or hire a executive that was closely aligned with them, or if they were willing to hire
someone ideologically distinct from them, and whether or not that has an effect on the ex ante
controls the organization uses to monitor the executive.

172

Ultimately, the evidence seems to support, the proposition that the executives of
nonprofit advocacy organizations matter. They are central actors in the American political
process, and their work has great effects on the nature and outcome of policymaking and
political implementation processes. This fact is not going to change, as individuals will
always strive for social change on the issues that they care about, and others will seek out
these groups in order to represent their values before decision-makers. Whether executives
are volunteering their time for a homeowner’s association advocating for specific local
ordinances, or are a paid staff member running a multi-million dollar environmental group,
their commitment to their organizations, their communities and their causes shape political
discourse and outcomes. In the U.S. context, they always have, and they always will.

173

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APPENDICES

Appendix A: Survey Instrument

194

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Appendix B: Interview Request Letter

208

Appendix C: Study Information Sheet

209

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Appendix D: Survey Recruitment Postcard

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Appendix E: Survey Recruitment Email

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Appendix F: Survey Recruitment Phone Script

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Appendix G: Table of NTEE Issue Fields and Frequency in Sample

NTEE Issue Field Category Frequency Percent Cumulative

Arts, Culture and Humanities 112 6.39 6
Education 93 5.31 12
Environment 63 3.59 15
Animal Related 51 3.08 18
Health 44 2.51 21
Mental Health 11 0.63 22
Voluntary Health Associations 7 0.4 22
Medical Research 2 0.11 22
Crime and Legal 90 5.13 27
Employment 37 2.11 29
Food, Agriculture and Nutrition 17 0.97 30
Housing and Shelter 122 6.96 37
Public Safety 65 3.71 41
Recreation and Sports 372 21.22 62
Youth Development 40 2.28 64
Human Services 51 2.91 67
International and National Security 4 0.23 68
Civil Rights, Social Action and Advocacy 44 2.51 70
Community Improvement and Capacity Building 342 19.51 90
Philanthropy, Voluntarism and Grantmaking 20 1.14 91
Science and Technology 4 0.23 91
Public and Societal Benefit 102 5.82 97
Religion-Related 29 1.65 98
Mutual and Membership Benefit 17 0.97 99
Unknown 11 0.63 100

215

Appendix H. Roll Call Votes, California Legislature 2012

1. SB 1234 – Establishes retirement program for private sector employees
o Passed Senate 23-13
o Passed Assembly 48-29
2. SB 1172 - Prohibits mental health providers from conducting “sexual orientation change efforts”
on patients under the age of 18.
o Passed Senate 23-13
o Passed Assembly 55-22
3. AB 1436 - Authorizes Same-Day Voter Registration
o Passed Senate 23-13
o Passed Assembly 47-26
4. AB 1640 - Expands Cash Assistance Programs for Pregnant Teenagers through CalWorks
program
o Passed Senate 25-12
o Passed Assembly 50-24
5. SB 95 – Allows the state to transfer funds from internal accounts
o Passed Senate 22-2
o Passed Assembly 54-17
6. AJR 22 - Requests a Constitutional Amendment to Overturn Citizens United
o Passed Assembly 48-22
o Passed Senate 24-11
7. SB 1455 (Kehoe) would have helped reduce California’s dependence on petroleum by increasing
alternative fuel usage statewide.
o Passed Assembly 51-25
o Passed Senate 25-13 (but failed on concurrence vote after Assembly amended)
8. SB 1066 (Lieu) clarifies that the California Coastal Conservancy may fund and undertake
projects to mitigate the effects of climate change.
o Passed Assembly 51-26
o Passed Senate 25-13
9. SB 1029 High-Speed Rail funding. Appropriated funds to begin construction of the high-speed
rail line.
o Passed Assembly 52-28
o Passed Senate 21-16
10. AB 1687 Would have expanded an injured worker’s access to medical treatment and claim
information.
o Passed Assembly 47-24
o Passed Senate 22-12
11. AB 2296 Improves disclosure to prospective students of private post-secondary schools.
o Passed Assembly 47-26
o Passed Senate 24-12

Abstract (if available)

Abstract Nonprofit organizations often engage in advocacy on behalf of specific groups or the public at large. Yet, the leaders of these organizations are not well understood although they play a crucial role in the policymaking processes at the local, state and national levels. While the literature does embrace the idea of political or policy entrepreneurs as crucial to group formation and maintenance (Chong 1991

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Creator Mason, Dyana Phyllis (author)

Core Title Strategy and ideology in nonprofit advocacy organizations

School School of Policy, Planning and Development

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Public Policy

Publication Date 08/05/2014

Defense Date 06/12/2014

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag advocacy,ideology,leadership,Management,nonprofit,OAI-PMH Harvest,policy

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Advisor Bertelli, Anthony M. (committee chair), Esparza, Nicole (committee member), Tang, Shui Yan (committee member)

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