Velasco, Kristopher and Pamela Paxton. 2022. “Deconstructed and Constructive Logics: Explaining Inclusive Language Change in Queer Nonprofits, 1998-2016.” American Journal of Sociology 127(4):1267-1310.
The United States is currently in the midst of a long, historic cultural transformation—redefining our collective representation to be inclusive of diverse sexual and gender identities. A core logic advancing this inclusion is to discursively recognize an expanded set of discrete, deconstructed identities—gay and lesbian expands to LGBT, LGBTQ, LGBTQIA1, and so on. But a newer logic stipulates that inclusion arises through using constructive identities that encompass many fluid experiences under a single term (e.g., “queer”). To understand inclusive change, the authors leverage a unique mesolevel site of cultural (re)production: service and advocacy nonprofit organizations. Using event history models, the authors investigate inclusive language change by 735 organizations from 1998 to 2016. They supplement analyses of administrative data with semistructured interviews with 13 nonprofit leaders, providing converging evidence. Findings showcase how bottom-up, horizontal, and top-down pressures explain both the inclusion of discrete identity labels and the shift to constructive logics.
Paxton, Pamela, Kristopher Velasco, and Robert Ressler. 2021. “Does Use of Emotion Increase Donations and Volunteers for Nonprofits?” American Sociological Review 85(6):1051-1083.
Nonprofits offer services to disadvantaged populations, mobilize collective action, and advocate for civil rights. Conducting this work requires significant resources, raising the question: how do nonprofits succeed in increasing donations and volunteers amid widespread competition for these resources? Much research treats nonprofits as cold, rational entities, focusing on overhead, the “price” of donations, and efficiency in programming. We argue that nonprofits attract donors and volunteers by connecting to their emotions. We use newly available administrative IRS 990 e-filer data to analyze 90,000 nonprofit missions from 2012 to 2016. Computational text analysis measures the positive or negative affect of each nonprofit’s mission statement. We then link the positive and negative sentiment expressed by nonprofits to their donations and volunteers. We differentiate between the institutional fields of nonprofits—for example, arts, education, social welfare—distinguishing nonprofits focused on social bonding from those focused on social problems. We find that expressed positive emotion is often associated with higher donations and volunteers, especially in bonding fields. But for some types of nonprofits, combining positive sentiment with negative sentiment in a mission statement is most effective in producing volunteers. Auxiliary analyses using experimental and longitudinal designs provide converging evidence that emotional language enhances charitable behavior. Understanding the role of emotion can help nonprofit organizations attract and engage volunteers and donors.
Ressler, Robert W., Pamela Paxton, Kristopher Velasco, Lilla Pivnick, Inbar Weiss, and Johaness Eichstaedt. 2021. “Nonprofits; A Public Policy Tool for the Promotion of Community Subjective Well-Being.” Journal of Public Administration Research & Theory 31(4):822-838.
Looking to supplement common economic indicators, politicians and policymakers are increasingly interested in how to measure and improve the subjective well-being of communities. Theories about nonprofit organizations suggest that they represent a potential policy-amenable lever to increase community subjective well-being. Using longitudinal cross-lagged panel models with IRS and Twitter data, this study explores whether communities with higher numbers of nonprofits per capita exhibit greater subjective well-being in the form of more expressions of positive emotion, engagement, and relationships. We find associations, robust to sample bias concerns, between most types of nonprofit organizations and decreases in negative emotions, negative sentiments about relationships, and disengagement. We also find an association between nonprofit presence and the proportion of words tweeted in a county that indicate engagement. These findings contribute to our theoretical understanding of why nonprofit organizations matter for community-level outcomes and how they should be considered an important public policy lever.