Christopher Dougherty
Christopher Dougherty received the H. Woods Bowman Student Award from the Nonprofit Finance & Financial Management section of the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA) at its 2023 conference in Orlando, Florida.
The award was established in memory of H. Woods Bowman, who was known for supporting the development of graduate students and early-career researchers. Eligibility for the award was based on being either a graduate student or postdoctoral researcher and having an abstract accepted for presentation at the ARNOVA conference on a topic related to nonprofit finance and financial management.
H. Woods Bowman
Doughtery presented preliminary results from one part of his dissertation research, which looks at the alignment of social identity between charities and political actors, and the ability of networks of organizations to express a common identity — and how identity alignment affects how government resources are allocated to charities.
In his study, Doughtery asks: how does government funding for charities change following elections? Using publicly available data, he looks at large-scale evidence of ideological or identity-based alignment between specific charitable subsectors or organizational clusters and political parties and, where there’s evidence, what are the effects of alignment?
The (very) preliminary results of a look at data from Alberta and Ontario that included provincial and federal transfers to charities from 2000-2017 show that, for a new government in its first term, transfers to charities drop in their first full fiscal year in office and continue to drop further in the following two years, before recovering somewhat at the end of their first term.
For a re-elected government, transfers to charities increase in each year after an election. Majority governments, and governments with a stronger majority, transfer less to charity than minority governments. Controlling for everything else, right-of-centre governments transfer less to charities than centre and left-of-centre governments do — at both the federal and provincial levels.
Economic conditions also affect government transfers to charities, with higher GDP per capita correlating with higher spending; this may be because government spending to charities tracks economic cycles.
These results are preliminary, and Dougherty will refine and expand on them in his dissertation to look at which specific charities governments give money to. Also, from data, we know the recipient organizations and the amounts they receive, but not why or how the recipients were chosen by government. The next stage of Dougherty’s analysis will look at: what influences government transfers to charities? Are transfers identity-, policy-, agenda-, or proximity-driven? Who do new governments take money away from? And, if transfers to charity are identity-driven, in what cases and under what conditions is it a politically expressive or partisan identity?
Christopher Dougherty is on LinkedIn. Banner photo is courtesy of Erik McLean.
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Wednesday, December 13, 2023 in For homepage, News & Events
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