Public Funding and Its Impact on Nonprofit Advocacy

Abstract

This article aims to contribute to the long-standing discussion about nonprofit organizations’ (NPOs) dependence on public funding and its consequences on their advocacy role in modern societies. Drawing on resource dependence theory and data from a quantitative survey, the study investigates the impact of public funding and its extent on nonprofit engagement in advocacy. Traditionally, scholars have cautioned that NPOs reliant on public sources will hesitate to pursue political objectives and to engage in advocacy work. Yet, empirical findings are strikingly inconsistent. One of the reasons for these ambiguous findings may be the way advocacy is measured. To address this issue, we apply two different approaches to evaluate NPO engagement. Both sets of findings from our multivariate analyses of Austrian NPOs suggest that public funding does not have a negative impact on advocacy.