Revolving Doors: Evidence about Interdependence of Governments and Nonprofits

• In Event: NGOs, Community Networks, and Policy Advocacy

Abstract

What explains the collaboration between governments and nonstate providers? When governments and nonstate organizations, such as nonprofits, collaborate, we turn to the classical complementary theory for explanations. In this approach, state and nonstate organizations join forces to sustain and expand service provision because of their complementary skills and comparative advantages in the production of public goods. In this paper, we offer an additional explanation to the partnership between governments and nonprofits. We argue that partnerships between states and nonprofits partly result from staff-to-staff interactions. These interactions, in turn, create informational pathways that promote and facilitate the creation of agreements and partnerships between state agencies and nonprofits.

To test these claims, we provide evidence using several fine-grained datasets for Brazilian municipalities over 15 years. Using Brazil’s national registry containing the census of all formal workers, we map all of workers’ transitions from nonprofits to state agencies and from state agencies to nonprofits in this period. This results in a dataset that can be aggregated at the worker, organization, and locality levels. We then combine this information with municipal grants given by local government to nonprofits to create rich panel dataset of all of 5,5570 for every year between 2003 to 2017. Finally, we move to a quantitative case study of three state capitals to examine whether, within an organization, we observe changes in funding when they hire a former public servant or a former employee joins local governments.

Our preliminary findings suggest a strong correlation between staff-to-staff interactions, via these two-way revolving doors, on organizations’ ability to acquire funds and on local governments’ largess toward nonstate organizations.

Author

• Natalia Salgado Bueno, Emory University