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Ensuring Nonprofit Passivity Abstract This paper explores the political behavior of 501(c)(3) nonprofits. Since these nonprofits offer tax deductions to donors, and are thus subsidized by taxpayer dollars, the government is justified in regulating what these nonprofits are allowed to do in the political arena. A first step here is to analyze competing interest group theories to judge how nonprofits fit into prevailing conceptions of the appropriate role of interest groups in a democracy. Interestingly, American law on public charities disregards those theories that justify participation by lobbies or recognize how skewed the interest group world is, and instead considers nonprofit lobbying as a potential danger to the integrity of the polity. The lobbying provision of charity law is examined closely and its ambiguity along with the inconsistent and inadequate administration of sec. 501(c)(3) by the IRS discourages nonprofits from participating in the public policymaking process. Drawing on data from the Strengthening Nonprofit Advocacy Project, the evidence demonstrates that nonprofit leaders badly misunderstand their rights under the law. The data also show that charity law significantly reduces the level of legislative lobbying by nonprofits. The result is that the most disadvantaged sectors of society receive reduced representation in the political system. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is the first in a series of papers reporting the final results of the Advocacy and Public Policymaking Project (http://lobby.la.psu.edu). We interviewed 315 policy advocates and government officials centrally involved in a random sample of 98 issues reflecting the full range of policy activities of the federal government during the last two years of the Clinton Administration and the first two years of the Bush Administration. In this paper we focus on the structure of policy conflict. Each of our 98 issues was conceptually multidimensional and understood in such a way by everyone involved. Policy debate surrounding the issues, however, was far more limited.. We map out the structure of policy disagreement across our issues, describing the surprisingly small numbers of distinct perspectives active on each case. Our findings help understand the causes of low-dimensionality in Washington debates. These structural features are broader than institutional design alone, and stem from the nature of the professional and knowledge-based communities surrounding the policies; the continuing nature of debates, which creates a strong status-quo bias; cost issues; and political and gate-keeping efforts. The paper is the first to lay out these dimensional structures and to describe the nature of policy disagreement and political conflict in a random sample of issues. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Popular accounts of interest group influence in the policy process often focus on organizational budgets and campaign contributions, asserting that these resources lead to outcomes that are most preferred by "special" interest groups. Scholarly work that has attempted to assess this influence, however, has come to no set conclusion - sometimes resources lead to influence, sometimes they do not, and sometimes the results are inconclusive. To address the question of whether increased financial resources leads to preferred policy outcomes, we make use of a set of 98 randomly selected U.S. national policy issues about which we have conducted more than 300 interviews and collected extensive secondary source information on more than 1,200 organized interests. Our data include information on a broad range of indicators of financial resources, as well as non-material resources such as governmental allies and group membership. We find that when resources are considered by group type, businesses and other occupational organizations have the clear advantage, especially for material resources. These findings confirm those of numerous previous surveys of interest groups in Washington. When analyzed at the issue level, however, we find that material resources tend to be fairly evenly split on each side of an issue. Poorer citizen groups often cooperate with more well-to-do business and professional organizations, and the citizen groups bring other resources to the table, including membership numbers and public legitimacy. Resource-rich organizations were no more likely than resource-poor organizations to be on the winning side of the policy debate. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]