Charities in court the advocacy efforts of charitable nonprofit organizations in the judicial venue - when? how? and how much? /

by 1969- Basinger, Nancy Winemiller

This dissertation examines the court-based advocacy activities of charitable nonprofit organizations during the decade of the 1990s. The study seeks to add to our understanding of the effect that internal organizational characteristics and external environmental factors can have on an organization’s choice to become involved in the policy process through the courts. The study uses a three-part analysis to understand the court-based advocacy of these groups, using three research questions for the study: (1) Over a period of ten years, what factors affect the choice of charitable nonprofit advocacy groups to participate in the courts? (2) What factors explain the annual frequency of the court-based advocacy of charitable nonprofit advocacy groups? (3) Of the charitable nonprofit advocacy groups that choose to participate in the courts, what factors affect the legal strategy choices they make on individual cases? To examine these questions, I collected court involvement data and organizational characteristic data on all charities in the United States that claimed to be involved in advocacy activities and whose annual income exceeded approximately three million dollars. The study finds that when considered from a cumulative perspective, over a period of ten years, internal organizational characteristics, including the presence of dues-paying members, are important in explaining the differences between charities that chose to advocate in court in the 1990s and those that did not. However, when considering court-based advocacy from an annual or case-level perspective, external environmental factors, including the regulatory and political environments, have a greater influence on charities.