Working Papers
#1 Inside National Service: AmeriCorps’ Short-Term Impact on Participants
Peter Frumkin, JoAnn Jastrzab, and Margaret L. Vaaler
This study examines for the first time the short-term impact of AmeriCorps participation on members’ civic engagement, education, employment, and life skills. The analysis compares changes in the attitudes and behaviors of participants over time to those of similarly interested individuals not enrolled in AmeriCorps, controlling for interest in national and community service, member and family demographics, and prior civic engagement. Results indicate that participation in AmeriCorps led to positive impacts on members, especially in the area of civic engagement, members’ connection to community, knowledge about problems facing their community, participation in community-based activities. AmeriCorps had some impact on its members’ personal growth and selected employment-related outcomes. Significant impacts were not found for measures of participants’ attitude toward education or educational attainment, or for selected life skills measures. The study also uncovers significant but negative impact of a participation programmatic variant of AmeriCorps on participants’ appreciation for ethnic and cultural diversity.
#2 Bono Made Jesse Helms Cry: Jubilee 2000,Debt Relief, and Moral Action in International Politics
Joshua William Busby
Do states and decision-makers ever act for moral reasons? And if they do, is it only when it is convenient or relatively costless for them to do so? A number of advocacy movements on developing country debt relief, climate change, landmines, and other issues emerged in the 1990s to ask decision-makers to make foreign policy decisions on that basis. The primary advocates were motivated not by their own material interests but broader notions of right and wrong. What contributes to the domestic acceptance of these moral commitments? Why do some advocacy efforts succeed where others fail? Through a case study of the Jubilee 2000 campaign for developing country debt relief, this article offers an account of persuasion based on strategic framing by advocates to get the attention of decision-makers. Such strategic but not narrowly self-interested activity allows weak actors to leverage existing value and/ or ideational traditions to build broader political coalitions. This article, through case studies of debt relief in the United States and Japan, also links the emerging literature on strategic framing to the domestic institutional context and the ways veto players or ‘‘policy gatekeepers’’ evaluate trade-offs between costs and values.
#3 Designing and Testing the Volunteer Program Assessment Tool (VPAT)
Sarah Jane Rehnborg, Dennis Poole, Michael Roemer, Laurel Mangrum, Kathleen Casey and Deborah Duvall
The need to assess the quality of federally or privately funded volunteer and national service programs has become increasingly critical. Experts in the field have recognized this need but lacked scientifically tested instruments to conduct such assessments. To advance knoweldge in this area we developed the Volunteer Program Assessment Tool (VPAT). This research paper describes the methods we used to design and test the full version of the instrument and the screener. To our knowledge the VPAT is the first instrument of its kind to be tested for reliability and validity, and have utility for volunteer program assessments in diverse organizational settings.
#4 Assessing National Service Outcomes: A Multilevel Approach
Margaret L. Vaaler and Peter Frumkin
The present study uses hierarchical linear modeling and a large sample of AmeriCorps
members and AmeriCorps programs to examine the determinants of national service outcomes at the individual and program levels. We found several demographic variations in civic engagement and trust, tolerance and life skills, including race variations in gains in constructive group interactions and personal behavior in groups post-service. Programmatic characteristics have important influences on AmeriCorps members’ civic engagement, tolerance, and trust post-service. Furthermore, the level of support of members that programs offer is a key component to success of AmeriCorps programs. We conclude that the impact of national service could be improved through a better and deeper understanding of the interaction of individual and program level influences on AmeriCorps members’ outcomes. Successfully managing the recruitment of members and the delivery of quality programs in the future will depend on how well the interactions of individual and program-level determinants are understood.
#5 The Politics of Need and Politics of Politics: Exploring the Motives of Donative Actors to Social Service Nonprofit Organizations in a Highly Politicized Field
Celeste Benson
This paper explores the capacity of several induced theories of philanthropic behavior to explain foundation grant-making patterns to nonprofit social service organizations working to address teenage pregnancy through counseling on "abortion alternatives." It argues that theories of nonprofit sector founding which stress that nonprofits will arise as a response to need do not help to explain the presence of such organizations across U.S. states in this field. Instead it argues that grant making patterns in highly politicized fields may best be explained by conceiving of funders as strategic and rational political actors whose grant making responds to structural opportunity and incentive.
#6 A New Analysis of Corporate Social Responsibility
Evgeny Firsov
This paper examines a few frames through which to analyze the CSR. One possibility to approach this subject is to look at it through the newer theoretical perspectives and in particular to study the advantages of corporate form in economizing on transaction costs and dealing with information asymmetries between their customers and the third sector organizations. Another opportunity is to approach corporations not as just anonymous production functions and pay more attention to the complex causations characterizing the internal social processes inside them. Finally, the special attention could be paid to the external embeddedness of firms in the wider market and social structures. So, the focus here will be broader than in standard Friedman's theorizing in the sense that will attempt to reflect in my modeling of CSR not only on the narrow corporate-actors, but also on the larger context surrounding them.
#7 Constructing Meaning Through Service: Beyond Beliefs and Actions
Chris Gauthier
Much of the literature on community service has sought to investigate the factors that compel individuals to participate. These studies have tended to investigate service using rational choice models or socialization and human capital perspectives. While this literature is useful it fails to address an important dimension of service, specifically the meaning that service has for individuals and how their service activities correspond to their vision of meaningful social change. This study proposes that there are different domains of service defined by the intersection of the type of work that an individual engages in (actions) and the individual's vision of how meaningful social change occurs (belief). Rational choice or market models would predict that individuals serve exclusively in domains that align belief and action; however, drawing on in-depth interviews with college age volunteers, the data presented here suggests that volunteers often engage in service activities that do not conform to expectations. Despite the tension between action and belief, these individuals still see their service work as meaningful. The ways individuals make meaning of service that is out of step with an ideal alignment of belief and action outcomes are explored.
#8 Global Governance and the Structuring of Global Civil Society: the Field of
Transnational Advocacy and the WTO
Kristen Hopewell
This paper sets out to analyze the current dynamics of transnational advocacy directed at the WTO. By examining the field of transnational advocacy surrounding the WTO, we can not only shed light on the contemporary dynamics of the global justice movement but also improve our understanding of global civil society. We focus on how transnational advocacy organizations are engaging with and seeking to influence the WTO. Transnational advocacy organizations refer to groups that transcend the boundaries of the individual nation-state and work to influence policy at the supra-national level. This analysis grows out of interviews with the major transnational advocacy organizations working on the WTO, as well as with WTO policy-makers including Secretariat staff and member-state delegates.
#9 The Safety Net as a Network
Helen K. Liu & David A. Reingold
The lack of a coherent understanding of what is meant by the American safety net made it difficult to have a meaningful discourse on the current condition. This paper proposes an alternative formulation of the social safety net based in network theory to overcome the shortcomings of the previous literature. The first part of the paper describes this approach, attempting to develop an alternative understanding of the safety net grounded in the actions of anti-poverty actors. Next is a list of propositions for measuring five dimensions of a safety net: the frame, structure, positions, influences, and the context. Three policy implications are derived from this new paradigm. First, shifting the level of analysis to network level allows policy makers to broaden the scope of the modern social safety net. Second, quantifying the interaction among actors reveals interdependency, which in turn redefines the power and influence of each actor within the network. Finally, the modern safety net could demonstrate a core-periphery structure. It calls for a new way of thinking about resource distribution and decision making channels of such unique structure.
#10 Soldiers to Citizens: The Link between Military Service and Volunteering
Rebecca Nesbit & David A. Reingold
Research has shown that military service is linked with some forms of political engagement, such as voting, especially for minorities. In this paper, we explore the relationship between military service and another measure of civic engagement - volunteering. Military service can help to overcome barriers to volunteering by helping to socialize people with a norm of civic responsibility, by providing social resources and skills that compensate for the lack of personal resources, and by making people aware of opportunities to volunteer and "asking" them to do so. The data used to explore this research question are from the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey (CPS) 2005 September supplement on volunteering. We find that military service is positively related to volunteering among blacks and Hispanics. Married veterans and veterans over the age of 65 are more likely to volunteer than nonveterans.
#11 Who Gets USAID Democracy Assistance?: Thinking About Foreign Aid in a Global
Society
Lindsey Peterson
Since the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was founded in 1962, it has provided more than $297 billion in Assistance Grants to developing countries around the world (USAID 2003). Nearly 100 developing countries currently receive, or have received, some form of assistance from USAID, which is the main distributor of foreign assistance from the United States. The distribution of foreign assistance is not uniform, however, with some countries receiving much more than others. Aid also varies by the type of monetary support, including environmental, food, agricultural, humanitarian, and political aid. The Center for Democracy and Governance (CDG) is responsible for allocating USAID funds specifically for the purpose of promoting democracy worldwide. The aim of this study is to determine how USAID decides which countries receive democracy assistance, and which ones do not. I examine competing explanations for how democracy aid distribution is determined.
#12 Intersectoral Crossings: From Activists to Civil Servants
Dr. Alejandro Natal
This paper examines the life-work histories of twenty-four civil society activists that crossed the boundary of the third sector into the government in Mexico (2000-2006). The motivation of the study was to document and analyse the experiences of these ?crossovers?, since, initial anecdotal evidence suggested that many of these individuals were working from the inside of government to promote progressive reforms. However, the data collected suggests a different picture. It indicates that (a) some of these people were ill-prepared in terms of their strategy for working within government, both in terms of understanding how things worked inside government, and in having no clear mandate from their constituencies or supporters; (b) some also lacked the necessary skills to negotiate and build agendas and support with other actors within government to shape the policy process once inside; (c) that this made them highly vulnerable to ?capture? or immobilisation by interest groups once inside; and (d) that their reputations and relationships with the broader third sector were damaged as a result of their entry into government. By contrast, the evidence suggests that civil society strategies to shape the policy process from outside the government had been more successful in bringing about progressive social change. The paper concludes with reflection on (a) lessons for theorizing about civil society and policy change in Mexico and (b) some reflections about civil society and government relationship.
