NGOs, Turnout, and the Left

Abstract

This article is designed to examine the role non-governmental organizations (NGOs) play in politics. Previous evidence suggests that NGOs mobilize communities to challenge existing patterns of authority or that they serve hand in glove with existing elites. We reconcile these two contradictory findings by identifying an important contextual feature that helps determine the extent NGOs mobilize or anesthetize. We argue that a community's level of education influences not only whether people vote but how they vote. We employ a cross-sectional data set from Brazilian municipalities that allows us to estimate the relationship between NGOs, voting turnout, and electoral results. We find that although there is a significant statistical interaction between literacy and NGOs when explaining voting turnout, the effect is not substantively important. The interaction between literacy and NGOs is, however, an important consideration in determining how people vote: in communities with relatively low literacy rates, a robust NGO presence significantly increases the left's electoral fortunes. Our findings imply the influence NGOs have on society is more political than social.

NGOs Activities and Local Government Spending in Upper West region of Ghana: Are they Complements or Substitutes?

“…The extant studies are particularly interested in examining the impact of NGOs in local governance notably on political participation (Boulding, 2014;Igoe, 2003;Kabeer, Mahmud, and Isaza Castro, 2012), women's empowerment (Goldman and Little, 2015;Nagar and Raju, 2003), voting behaviour (Brown, Brown, and Desposato, 2014) and more recently local natural resource policy (Cook et al, 2016). Given the proliferation of new NGOs, the existence of old ones, and their interaction with local authorities in sustainable development process, it is important to examine whether NGOs complement the core mandate of local authorities in provision of social amenities or act as substitutes.…”

Local Politics of Forest Governance: Why NGO Support Can Reduce Local Government Responsiveness

“…However, scholars have rarely studied the impacts of this support on local decision-making using quantitative methods (Wright & Andersson, 2012). While scholars are increasingly interested in understanding the role of NGOs in developing country governance, much recent local-level research has focused on relationships between external NGOs and local citizens, such as the effects of NGO activities on women's empowerment (Goldman & Little, 2015), political participation (Boulding, 2014), and voting behavior (Brown, Brown, & Desposato, 2014). As important as these questions are for understanding the impacts of NGO activities on local communities, the relationship between NGOs and local governments remains largely understudied, despite the importance that local government policy for quality of life in decentralized contexts.…”