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 despite their crucial role in the policymaking process.  While the literature embraces 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 and impacting the American political process.   

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.   This framework provides a powerful, and intuitive, tool with which to evaluate the role of executives in guiding the organization’s strategy, both directly and indirectly.  While agency theory evaluates the relationship between two individuals or groups -- one principal, and one agent -- common agency, on the other hand, 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.  Although there is some overlap with Stakeholder Theory (Donaldson and Preston 1995; Freeman 1984), which argues that “Stakeholders are persons or groups with legitimate interests in procedural and/or substantive aspects of corporate activity”, common agency recognizes that agents are not only concerned with the interests of various stakeholders, but are concerned about their own self-interest as well.  The result is that these often conflicting interests can have unexpected implications for an organization’s behavior.

I thus argue that a nonprofit leader has significant discretion in the decision-making of their organization.  This assertion is supported empirically following survey of nonprofit leaders across the state of California.  It’s therefore possible to evaluate the ways leaders have in navigating both internal and external stakeholders in structuring the advocacy work of their organization.