AMERICAN POLITICS & PUBLIC POLICY WORKSHOP
Abstract: Eighty percent of local governments outsource service delivery to private organizations, and the majority of social services are outsourced to community-based non-profits. These non-profit service providers operate as privatized arms of street-level bureaucracy and outside pressure groups interested in their own organizational maintenance. While research has documented many cases of non-profit influence in local politics, it remains unclear when, where, and why non-profit service providers are politically active and influential. In this talk, I argue that non-profits which develop close, mutually trusting relationships with government officials are more likely to be politically active and influential. Drawing on over one hundred interviews and participant observation from four municipal case studies, I trace the ways in which non-profits’ reliance on material and immaterial resources from government officials shapes their political activity and influence. I extend my findings with quantitative analyses of national survey data of non-profit organizations. This project complicates our understanding of privatization by showing how policies intended to increase efficiency have embedded rent-seeking organizations in government processes and speaks to contemporary debates about the independence of U.S. civil society.
Nicholas Ottone is a sixth-year PhD Candidate in Political Science at Yale University. He studies local political economy, public policy, and political behavior. His dissertation focuses on the causes and consequences of outsourcing social services to non-profit service providers at the local and state level, drawing on original interviews, participant observation, and survey experiments. His work has been published in the British Journal of Political Science and American Politics Research.
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