Outsourcing may lead public administrators to regard service recipients as customers to be satisfied rather than as citizens demanding access and empowerment. This research investigates the extent to which social service nonprofits might bridge the gap between citizenship and customer service to advance shared values and reinforce public institutions. Due to unique institutional and organizational features, such as value-driven commitments, restrictions to financial distribution, and special knowledge of under-represented groups, social service nonprofit contractors may offer distinct advantages over for-profit firms in contract management. We begin by analyzing the conflicting and complementary aspects of citizenship and customer service in democracy and identify the advantages of nonprofit contractors. Then, using the lenses of transaction cost economics and agency theory, we explore how nonprofits can mitigate contract risks while bolstering citizenship. We present several suggestions to guide public agencies and future scholarship on reasserting the importance of public values in modern governance.

The study of nonprofit advocacy has evolved significantly over the past two decades, yet gaps still remain in our understanding of the processes and roles of nonprofit organizations in policymaking and policy change. In part, these gaps may be exacerbated by limitations in the methodologies and research designs used to examine advocacy, despite the growing scholarship base. To investigate this possibility, this article reports the findings of a systematic literature review of 264 scholarly articles that examine the antecedents, processes, and/or outcomes of nonprofit advocacy. The sampling method relies heavily on scholarship published in six leading nonprofit and public administration journals. Although theory suggests that nonprofit organizations have a vital role in facilitating policy processes, much of the advocacy research relies upon a limited form of research questions and methods. Findings also reveal a need for greater precision in describing data, design, and methods, and suggest a need for clearer, validated measures of both nonprofit advocacy efforts and the resulting outcomes. Finally, we suggest new areas for nonprofit advocacy research, including investigating new venues, different levels of analysis, employing emerging research methods, and examining advocacy over time.

Diverse national and cross-national studies have documented “nonprofit sector effects”—demonstrating that aggregate measures of the size and scope of the nonprofit sector (e.g., density, total number, total linkages) in a community have a substantively meaningful influence on outcomes such as violent crime, drug overdoses, happiness, and corporate social responsibility. Why and how does the nonprofit sector in a community produce such effects? Extant studies offer several plausible arguments for why they expect the nonprofit sector to matter, positing four key underlying mechanisms or drivers based on nonprofit attributes: managerialism; interorganizational ties; political engagement and advocacy; and civic engagement and community embeddedness. In this article, we seek to contribute to the literature on nonprofit sector effects by presenting a landscape of formal civil society in the Puget Sound, a region of the United States anchored by the city of Seattle. More specifically, we utilize the context of the Puget Sound to explore the underlying drivers that have been invoked to explain aggregate effects. Our findings indicate that nonprofits indeed are critical civic threads in the organizational tapestry of the Puget Sound. Inequality and social problems nevertheless have accompanied economic growth in recent decades, and these factors are fraying those civic threads and straining the capacity of the nonprofit sector. Although we conclude that the nonprofit sector could generate aggregate effects in the Puget Sound, to some extent the region constitutes an extreme case for addressing the drivers, as the area has a reputation for its vibrant associational life and for its highly educated and politically engaged populace. Comparative analyses consequently will be essential for assessing the distinctiveness of the region and for explaining how different configurations of drivers in local contexts shape nonprofit sector effects.

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