Abstract
This article explores which interest groups, political parties and service-oriented organisations – membership-based voluntary organisations constitutive for civil society – experience the accessing and maintenance of state funding as a major challenge and why. Building on resource dependency theory, hypotheses are presented on how different financial dependencies (public and private) and the diversity of organisational income affect how intensely membership-based organisations are exposed to state funding pressure. Testing these hypotheses with new data from four organisation surveys in Germany, Norway, Switzerland and the UK indicates that different types of state funding dependencies (e.g. grants, contracts) as well as funding diversity increase organisational concerns about state funding, while reliance on membership fees reduces them. These findings have important repercussions as state funding pressure is central to organisations’ revenue-seeking behaviour by focussing leaders’ attention on state authorities, thereby redirecting organisational priorities away from organisations’ constituencies.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks go to the two West European Politics referees and to Adrià Albareda, Endre Borbáth, Patricia Correa, Bert Fraussen, Darren Halpin, Thomas Holyoke, Milka Ivanovska Hadjievska and William Maloney for their helpful feedback on an early version of the paper. Thanks also go to Hin-Kin Or for his research assistance on the STATORG project. The usual disclaimer applies.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Civil society organisations (CSOs) are defined as voluntary organisations with a formalised infrastructure, that are private (separate from government), non-profit-distributing and self-governing, with members being either individuals or corporate actors such as firms, institutions, or associations (a subset of organisations cutting across the broader categories of ‘non-profit’ and ‘organised interest’) (Jordan et al. Citation2004; Salamon and Anheier Citation1998).
2 As the empirical boundaries between advocacy- and service-oriented groups are blurred, it is suitable – depending on the focus of the research – to study different group types jointly (e.g. Hasenfeld and Gidron, Citation2005; Heylen et al. Citation2018; Kimberlin Citation2010; LeRoux and Goerdel Citation2009).
5 Organisational leaders manage the day-to-day running of an organisation as well as its outside relations (e.g. Cigler and Loomis Citation2012).
7 Consequently, state funding pressure can be experienced by organisations with and without current or past state funding access.
9 Parties might receive tax benefits as ‘parties’, as ‘non-profits’, or receive tax benefits for their donors (or a mixture thereof). Of 19 long-lived democracies (including the four countries covered below) only Luxembourg provides none. Meanwhile, only 5 of the same 19 democracies restrict tax benefits for groups to public benefit or charitable organisations without including in the specification of beneficiaries also political and/or partisan organisations (Bolleyer Citation2018: 95, 151). The data examined here indicates the relevance of this funding source for all three types of organisations: for 25% of parties they are important/very important as compared to 34% of interest groups and service-oriented organisations, respectively.
10 While the categories of grants and contracts are discussed in non-profit and interest group research (e.g. Harris Citation2010; Leech Citation2006) they are also relevant for parties: 20% of service-oriented organisations covered in this study identify state contracts as important or very important for their budget, 10% of interest groups and 10% of parties do. In comparison, to 31% of parties, 28% of service-orientated organisations and 21% of interest groups state grants are important or very important.
11 Both in group and party research, a related debate has focussed – rather than on diversification as defined here – on the balance between different types of income and its consequences, making arguments about organisations’ state funding reliance to ‘crowd out’ private fundraising in terms of donations or membership fees (e.g. Andreoni and Payne Citation2003; Pierre et al. Citation2000).
13 A factor analysis was conducted to confirm the accuracy of selecting these three items to construct the index. The Scree test suggests that one factor should be extracted from the three item with eigenvalue equals to 2.64. All three items have high factor loadings (0.91, 0.98 and 0.83).
15 Also note that multicollinearity diagnostics shows that each of the variables in the model has a variance inflation factor below 3.5 (see Online Appendix D). Hence, multicollinearity is not a concern (Imdadullah et al. Citation2016).
17 While an analysis excluding parties brings the same result as the main model in Table 1 (see Online Appendix E, Table E7), the party sample – though no less representative of their population than the group sample (see for details Online Appendix B) – is too small to run the analysis only for them.
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Funding
This research has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–13)/ERC grant agreement 335890 STATORG). This support is gratefully acknowledged.
Notes on contributors
Nicole Bolleyer
Nicole Bolleyer is Chair of Comparative Political Science at the Geschwister-Scholl Institute of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) in Munich (Germany). She is the author of The State and Civil Society: Regulating Interest Groups, Parties and Public Benefit Organisations in Contemporary Democracies (Oxford University Press 2018). Her research has appeared in a range of leading journals such as Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Politics and the European Journal of Political Research. [[email protected]]