Assessing the International Influence of Private Philanthropy: The Case of OSF

• In Event: Philanthropy in Perilous Times: Help or Hindrance?

Abstract

Assessing the International Influence of Private Philanthropy: The Case of Open Society Foundations

Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, Lucas Nuñez, and Hayden Ludwig

The Open Society Foundations (OSF) is a private philanthropic foundation, which was founded in April of 1993 by Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros. In a New York Times Magazine article, Michael Steinberger (2017) describes Soros’s OSF as “a sprawling entity, with some 1,800 employees in 35 countries, a global advisory board, eight regional boards and 17 issue-oriented boards. Its annual budget of around $1 billion finances projects in education, public health, independent media, immigration and criminal-justice reform and other areas. Organizations like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood are among its grantees” (par. 9).

OSF receive its name and inspiration from Karl Popper’s book The Open Society and Its Enemies. As such, it aims to promote liberal democratic societies in order to forestall totalitarianism and to allow societies to flourish. The central goal of OSF is thus the promotion of democratic governance and open societies around the world. To this end, the organization structures its activities around ten main theme objectives that cover a wide range of topics like democratic practice, governance, equality, human rights, journalism and information, education, and justice. To further these goals, Soros has donated billions of dollars to OSF, including an $18 billion donation in 2017. The foundations have made substantial grants to organizations located outside the United States—the focus of this article—totaling a combined $1.7 billion between 1999 and 2018.

The work of OSF, and particularly its founder, have been highly criticized at different levels, both within the United States and abroad. Different actors and even foreign governments have alleged that the actual achievements of Soros’s private philanthropic foundations do not coincide with their overall mission and goals. It has been said that OSF, instead of aiming to promote open societies, assign its funds to achieve very specific political/electoral or geopolitical objectives that do not necessarily adhere to its principles. According to these views, OSF purportedly destabilizes nations and goes against the basic aims of philanthropy, thus putting into question OSF’s essence as a private philanthropic foundation and the tax benefits that go with this status.

The present work focuses exclusively on assessing the international influence of George Soros’s foundations. After explaining OSF’s goals and criticisms, it describes the trends on all OSF grants assigned worldwide between 1999 and 2018. Then, it presents an analysis of the country characteristics that predict the receipt of—and the amounts received in—OSF funding in the years 2014-2018. Finally, it utilizes a novel method for causal inference and a macro-level perspective to determine the effectiveness of OSF in achieving its goals and the validity of some of the criticisms against this private philanthropic foundation. This study was possible by making use of an original database assembled by collecting all 990 forms that OSF filed with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) during the period 1999-2018.

According to the present research, countries receiving funding from Open Society Foundations tend to be those that already possess stronger underpinnings for an open society. The results show that countries receiving more funding from OSF in the period we analyzed tend to be those with more developed democracies and more open societies. At the same time, evidence presented in this study does not support allegations of a significant influence of OSF funding on the organization of protests or incitement of mass migrations in order to destabilize regions or countries.

The main findings of this study show that, on a selected group of variables, there is no evidence that countries receiving high levels of OSF funding move in the direction of OSF goals. In fact, we find no effect of OSF funding at all. We also find no effect that support some of the criticisms against OSF, also captured by a selected group of variables. We conclude this article with potential explanations for these null findings as well as suggesting avenues for future research into OSF but, more generally, into large philanthropic endeavors.

Authors

• Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, George Mason University

• Lucas Nunez, George Mason University