Issue 2 in Series, "Exploring Organizations and Advocacy"
The nonpartisan Urban Institute publishes studies, reports, and books on timely topics worthy of public consideration. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders.
Contents
About the Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy
About the Series
List of Seminars
Executive Summary
1 Nonprofit Organizations, Political Engagement, and
Public Policy
by Judith R. Saidel
2 How Do Members Count? Membership, Governance, and
Advocacy in the Nonprofit World
by Michael W. Foley and Bob Edwards
3 Walking a Political Tightrope: Responsiveness and
Internal Accountability in Social Movement Organizations
by Debra C. Minkoff
4 What Practitioners Can Tell Us: Critical Lessons from the
Advocacy Institute
by David Cohen
5 Global Advocacy: The Building of Civil Society through NGOs
by Milton Cerny
Appendix: Seminar Proceedings
List of Seminar Attendees
About the Editors
About the Contributors
About the Cohosts
Executive Summary
Exploring Organizations and Advocacy, the Fall/Winter 2000-2001 series, examined the operations of nonprofit organizations and their interaction with the regulatory and policy environment, funding sources, and citizens. Three seminars were conducted during the series, and the papers presented, as well as summaries of related discussions, are published in two separate issues: Issue 1, Strategies and Finances (released in August 2000), and Issue 2, Governance and Accountability.
This issue, Governance and Accountability, contains the complete text of five papers that were presented at Seminars 6 and 8 during the winter and spring of 2001. These papers examine the internal operations of nonprofit organizations and discuss how their mission, capacity, governance, and constituency shape their advocacy and their internal and public accountability. They also examine important aspects of nonprofit advocacy at the international level from a practitioner and legal perspective. We hope that the themes discussed in this volume open new research avenues by which to study and compare advocacy groups at the local, national, and global level.
Summary of Chapters
Nonprofit Organizations, Political Engagement, and Public Policy
Judith Saidel, of the Center for Women in Government and Civil Society at the University at Albany, reviews and synthesizes significant recent empirical studies written to answer very different research questions. She offers an integrative framework of political engagement processes to which many nonprofit organizations make important contributions. Saidel also examines the functions of nonprofits in overlapping phases of political engagement—activation, mobilization, political participation—and analyzes how current public policy trends support or impede each of these engagement processes. Volunteers and political engagement, and the growing influence of elites within nonprofit organizations, receive analytical attention. Saidel identifies contradictory findings and gaps in the literature, as well as promising directions for future research.
How Do Members Count? Membership, Governance, and Advocacy in the Nonprofit World
Michael Foley, of the Catholic University, and Bob Edwards, of East Carolina University, examine the question of how members "count" for their organizations— how having members affects their start-up and survival, financial stability, tactics, credibility, decisionmaking, and governance—with an eye to larger questions about what membership means for democracy. The authors attempt to clarify concepts and point to ways in which the current debate might be enriched and research enhanced. They argue that "membership" may be too unstable a concept to yield much analytical purchase and suggest a vocabulary that might better shape future research. In the final part of the paper, Foley and Edwards analyze a unique data set on peace movement organizations in the 1980s to demonstrate that current perceptions of the nonprofit advocacy sector are skewed by a "tyranny of existing data" that overemphasizes large, national organizations.
Walking a Political Tightrope: Responsiveness and Internal Accountability in Social Movement Organizations
Debra Minkoff, of the Department of Sociology at the University of Washington, examines the tension between external responsiveness and internal accountability in social movement organizations. Drawing on organizational case studies of three recent social movements—feminism, AIDS, and public interest science—she demonstrates the ways that organizational identity both enables and sets a boundary on trajectories of organizational change and the internal consequences for the group. Extending or altering issue emphasis appears to be less disruptive than creating new operating procedures, but, to the extent that structural change is required, organizers need to convince members and supporters that changes are congruent with group identity. Some strategies for maintaining internal accountability include diversifying the grassroots base of support and working with new organizational constituencies to familiarize them with the group's original identity while also giving established stakeholders a role in the new practices being put into place.
What Practitioners Can Tell Us: Critical Lessons from the Advocacy Institute
David Cohen, of the Advocacy Institute, addresses issues of social justice advocacy that affect people worldwide, cutting across national boundaries and differences in cultures and histories. These issues are drawn primarily from the Advocacy Institute's experience working at the national and international level. Cohen examines how practitioners and researchers can work together to explore and learn about advocacy issues that have been ignored. The author calls practitioners to share valuable insights into how social change is created and thwarted, and encourages researchers to probe and reflect on these themes.
Global Advocacy: The Building of Civil Society through NGOs
Milton Cerny, of Caplin & Drysdale, Chartered, examines the growth of voluntary organizations in Eastern Europe, the tax structures that regulate them, and some examples of current issues facing nongovernmental organizations in the arena of international philanthropy. Cerny states that in many countries, the change from a centrally planned to a market-oriented economy requires fundamental modifications of the tax policy. These tax regulations will promote the growth of the nonprofit sector as governments begin to realize the value of nonprofits in relieving state obligation to conduct social welfare and humanitarian activities. These legal changes will also occur as governments begin to perceive the need to share scarce revenues with these nonprofits and to provide tax incentives for donors who contribute to these organizations.
This report is available in its entirety in the Portable Document Format (PDF), which many find convenient when printing.
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