Political ideology of nonprofit organizations

Abstract

Objective: This article provides a novel measure of nonprofit political ideology using semantic text analysis of public Internal Revenue Service filings. It explores the relationship between electoral competition and private donations. Methods: Mission statements of over 150,000 U.S. nonprofits are matched to Congressional speeches to classify ideology on a political spectrum. The measure is validated against established ideology scores. Donation data are analyzed to examine if donors strategically countervail expected policy changes after elections. Results: The proposed measure shows a significant correlation with other ideology metrics. Donations are found to move in sync with ideological shifts of the government rather than to countervail expected policy changes after elections. Conclusion: The mission statement-based measure enables studying nonprofit positioning. Findings suggest expressive motivations make donation trends complementary to voting trends.