Multilevel political connections and nonprofit revenues under authoritarianism: Evidence from Chinese foundations

Abstract

Under authoritarianism, nonprofits establish formal political connections at the organizational level when they are affiliated with the state or at the individual level when they have government officials assume managerial positions. From the perspective of multilevel interorganizational relations, this article uses a sample of Chinese foundations to investigate the association of the two levels of political connections and their interactions with a wide range of nonprofit revenues. The results report no positive relationship between individual political connections and nonprofit revenues and quite limited evidence that above relationship is positively moderated by organizational political connections. At the organizational level, politically connected foundations may receive more government grants and domestic and overseas donations than civic foundations, depending on which type of agencies they are affiliated with-government or quasi-government. The results imply authoritarian states may shift toward institutionalized measures to manage nonprofits and reduce the involvement of government officials to ensure policy consolidation.

The program efficiency of environmental and social non-governmental organizations: A comparative study

“…In the context of this study, based on Johnson and Ni [ 60 ], it is measured by four indicators: " Registration " (NGO registration level), " Previous_Gov " (number of staff who have worked in provincial governmental organizations), " Current_Gov " (number of staff who are currently in national governmental agencies), and Gov_Fund (NGOs’ total funds from the government). Finally, the control variables were selected based on Wang [ 61 ]. In this sense, the following variables were selected in this study: Yr (number of years since NGOs started operations), Scope (whether NGO is operating nationwide or locally), and Start_Fund (NGO startup capital).…”

What Matters for Charitable Donations Under Authoritarianism? An Examination of Organizational Legitimacy and Political Connections

“…However, guanxi is hidden and hard to examine (Zhou and Ye, 2021) and does not necessarily capture the impact of formal political embeddedness (Q. Wang, 2021b). Ni and Zhan (2017) and Wei (2020) equated political connections with government control and believed such control meant greater financial opportunities for NGOs.…”

“…Johnson and Ni (2015) and Wei (2020) formulated political connections as guanxi , a Chinese culture broadly defined as an informal interpersonal relationship. However, guanxi is hidden and hard to examine (Zhou and Ye, 2021) and does not necessarily capture the impact of formal political embeddedness (Q. Wang, 2021b).…”