Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

In seeking to understand how nonprofits engage in advocacy and, by extension, collective advocacy, public management scholars have overlooked an important barrier to this activity: collective action problems. Here I show that such challenges strongly shape collective advocacy efforts undertaken by charter schools. Using survey, interview, and IRS Form 990 data for the complete set of charter school membership associations in the United States, I measure associations for membership density and advocacy activity, and include variables that speak to collective action problems – particularly the size of state charter school populations. The analysis finds: as school populations increase, participation in associations decreases, holding other factors constant such as policy context and the age of state charter laws. These findings suggest that collective action problems, not simply organizational resources, shape nonprofit participation in collective advocacy.

While political scientists have investigated interest groups extensively through the lens of collective action, nonprofit advocacy scholars have rarely taken this approach. Literature on nonprofit advocacy leads us to expect resource constraints, and perhaps the 501c3 lobbying restriction, explain nonprofit absence or exit from advocacy. Given the current state of scholarship, it is difficult to recommend that a collective action approach be incorporated into our evolving understanding of nonprofit advocacy because evidence is unavailable to support such a basic assertion. This study contributes to methodology in policy scholarship by measuring populations of mission-driven nonprofits for freeriding behavior. From a collective action perspective, actors weigh participation costs against expected policy benefits as well as against the likelihood of being pivotal to policy change (Olson, 1965). But nonprofit organizations are mission-driven, and their missions typically envision, or at least imply, expanding the common good. One might assume that nonprofits are motivated to participate in cooperatives and so form advocacy collaborations without the free riding behavior characteristic of collective action problems. Studies have measured under-contribution and free riding among individuals, for-profit firms, and within social movements, but empirical methods for detecting collective action barriers among service organizations are underdeveloped. This study steps squarely into this gap.