The nonprofit model turned membership advocacy groups into advocates serving donor interests.
Evidence
The shift to the non-profit also changed the very composition of many of these advocacy groups. Instead of relying on dues-paying members, they increasingly reached out to wealthy donors to fill their coffers. In a federation in which the state was increasingly abandoning its redistributive role, this shift created a natural constituency for new welfare recipients. The logic was clear: associations that practically operated as businesses, but did not want to fulfill their obligations to the state treasury, saw their chance in the non-profit model. The American political scientist Theda Skocpol conceptualized this new civil society as relying on an “advocacy without members”: non-profit organizations as the lawyers of a deaf and mute defendant. The similarity with the euro-lobbies, which also swarmed around the remaining member states, was evident. — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment, 143
Categorization
- ADDENDUM: The claim that nonprofits became welfare recipients of a state abandoning redistribution, with their membership evaporated, could fuel a follow-up to the trees/sacrifice articles about hollowed-out civic infrastructure.
- SEED: ‘Advocacy without members: the nonprofit as lawyer of a deaf and mute defendant’ is a sharp frame for a short piece on how advocacy organizations drifted from constituents to funders.
- XREF: connects to: Government subsidies bought influence over the expellee organizations. — Pertti Ahonen, Domestic Constraints on West German…, 94
Broader Connections
- Government subsidies bought influence over the expellee organizations.
#corroborates(0.72) — Pertti Ahonen, Domestic Constraints on West German…, 94