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When making charitable donations, individuals would like to have some assurance that their resources will be used appropriately, but they do not necessarily have the time to research charities thoroughly. Charities have thus joined voluntary regulatory programs to signal trustworthiness and good governance. We conduct a survey experiment to explore if individual donors in the United States are more willing to give to a charity participating in a voluntary regulatory program. Because voluntary programs vary in their institutional design, we further test whether the provision of third-party auditing (to ensure that charities abide by program rules and obligations) enhances donor confidence in the voluntary program. Finally, we explore whether individuals seek to circumvent information problems by donating to local charities as opposed to overseas charities. We find that charity membership in a voluntary program does not influence people's willingness to donate significantly, but that location of operations is significant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do some nonprofits signal their respect for accountability via unilateral website disclosures? We develop an Accountability Index to examine the websites of 200 U.S. nonprofits ranked in the Chronicle of Philanthropy's 2010 'Philanthropy 400.' Our intuition is that nonprofits recognize that the 'nondistributional constraint' by itself may not generate sufficient trust. We expect nonprofits' incentives for website disclosures will be shaped by their organizational and sectoral characteristics. Our analyses suggest that nonprofits appearing frequently in newspapers disclose more accountability information while nonprofits larger in size disclose less. Religion-related nonprofits tend to disclose less information, suggesting that religious bonding enhances trust and reduces incentives for self-disclosure. Nonprofits in the health sector disclose less information, arguably because governmental regulations in which they are embedded reduce marginal benefits from voluntary disclosures. Education nonprofits, on the other hand, tend to disclose more accountability information perhaps because they supply credence goods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries vary in their regulatory approach toward nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)? This article introduces an index to assess NGO regulation regarding barriers to entry, NGOs’ political capacity, and economic activity. Our cross-section analysis of 28 OECD countries offers preliminary evidence of systematic differences in NGO regulation between corporatist and pluralist systems. We suggest corporatist systems have more restrictive regulations because NGOs risk upsetting the political order and managed social consensus. In pluralist countries, NGOs face fewer restrictions because governments view them as substitutes for formal communication channels. We present two cases, Japan (corporatist) and the United States (pluralist), to illustrate this argument. In sum, macroinstitutional arrangements of political representation have a crucial bearing on national styles of NGO regulation. Future uses of this index include examining the effects of national context on international NGOs (INGOs), explaining variations in organizational structures and strategies among NGOs, and tracking variations in NGO–state relations over time. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the regulation of international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, and Japan to answer two questions. First, to what extent has the domestic institutional context facing INGOs changed following dramatic attacks by transnational terrorists on Western liberal democracies? Second, what effect has new counterterrorism legislation had on the organizational and strategic decisions of INGOs, and thus their locations and operations, since 2001? We argue that formal regulations on non-profits have changed less than expected, given widespread alarm about counterterrorism legislation in non-profit communities around the world. However, a new climate of uncertainty has hampered INGOs ability to adjust appropriately to their new institutional environment. Counterterrorism regulations have thus generated unintended consequences, including inefficiencies, redistribution of resources, and self-censorship that may outweigh the benefits for national security given the limited nature of much of the regulatory change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine variations in nongovernmental organizations' (NGOs') responses to post- 2001 changes in counterterrorism regulations in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan. We connect the presence of different ideal type responses- hiding, shirking, vocal opposition, participating, and litigating-to the extent of change in regulations, the degree of uncertainty (and risk) created by new regulations, and the availability of political institutions for NGO participation in policy-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]