Presidents and nonprofits: Illustrating compositional modeling of the U.S. nonprofit sector
Objectives
Nonprofits sit at the intersection of policy and politics. Compositional modeling presents an opportunity for nonprofit scholars to investigate trade-offs within the nonprofit sector.
Methods
Using U.S. nonprofit and political data from 1993 to 2013, I employ a dynamic pie modeling strategy to illustrate how federal politics affect the composition of the nonprofit sector.
Results
U.S. federal politics, measured as changes in presidential partisanship, correlate with trade-offs in the composition of the nonprofit sector. Democratic presidents are associated with increases in new Human Services (HU), Environment and Animals (EN), and International/Foreign Affairs (IN) nonprofits and decreases in new Arts/Culture/Humanities (AR), Education (ED), Health (HE), Religion Related (RE), and Unknown/Unclassified (UN) nonprofit organizations.
Conclusions
Theoretically, politics may play a greater role in the nonprofit sector than scholars currently give credence to. Empirically, compositional modeling strategies provide avenues for new theoretical and empirical insights into nonprofit organizations.