Challenges and Opportunities Facing Nonprofit Organizations

Books reviewed in this article:
Lester M. Salamon (ed.), The State of Nonprofit America
Peter Frumkin, On Being Nonprofit: A Conceptual and Policy Primer
Paul C. Light, Pathways to Nonprofit Excellence     

Public Opinion and the Role of Government Arts Funding in Spain

While several studies have probed the determinants of public support for government funding of arts and culture in the United States, little work to date has addressed the question in Europe. Yet as private cultural funding increases in magnitude in most Western European countries, the answer to this question has policy implications. This article formalizes the theory of the determinants of this public support in a model, employs public opinion data from Spain to estimate this model, and compares the results with those from the U.S. I find that support in Spain increases strongly with age, but is insignificant in most other variables. The article's empirical results yield several lessons for cultural policy design.     

A Question of Morality: Artists' Values and Public Funding for the Arts

In 1989, the combination of art, religion, homosexuality, ana¹ public dollars set off an explosive two-year battle and a decade of skirmishes over funding for the National Endowment for the Arts. To promote artistic freedom and to avoid political controversy, federal arts policy delegates specific funding decisions to private donors and arts professionals. In an era of morality politics—hot-button issues driven by deeply held beliefs rather than by expertise—that strategy no longer works. Artists, donors, and arts audiences diverge widely from the rest of the American public in their attitudes toward religion, sexual morality, and civil liberties, as General Social Survey data show. Delegating funding decisions to them has naturally led to some subsidies of art offensive to important segments of the population.     

Cultural Penetration and Punctuated Policy Change: Explaining the Evolution of U.S. Energy Policy

Punctuated equilibrium theory (PET) suggests that the policy process is characterized by long periods of incremental change and short periods of punctuated change. The impetus for the latter is usually a focusing event that breaks open policy monopolies, allowing for major changes in legislative decision making. While a burgeoning body of literature, a shortcoming in the PET literature is that it has yet to explain why focusing events and subsequent breakdowns in policy monopolies sometimes fail to result in punctuated policy. We integrate theories on cultural change with punctuated equilibrium to explain why focusing events do not always result in the dramatic policy changes that we might expect. Specifically, we use the context of national energy policy and the lexical database, Google Ngram Viewer, to trace punctuating energy‐related events and the occurrence or lack thereof subsequent policy change from 1952 to 2000.     

Pyro-Terrorism—The Threat of Arson-Induced Forest Fires as a Future Terrorist Weapon of Mass Destruction

The United States is at significant risk of a future pyro-terrorist attack—when terrorists unleash the latent energy in the nation's forests to achieve the effect of a weapon of mass destruction—the threat, must be defined America's vulnerabilities understood, and action taken to mitigate this danger to the United States.     

The new constitutions of east Germany

The restoration of the Lander in the former GDR in 1990 and the unification of Berlin called for a round of constitution drafting in the east that resulted in considerable discussion and controversy within the attentive public and, especially, among legal scholars in all of Germany. Controversy focused on two general issues: direct democracy and certain constitutional provisions such as social rights and state goals. Direct democracy is nothing new for the Länder, since most West German Land constitutions provided for referenda long before the Wall collapsed. But the three‐step process adopted in the east, and in particular the relatively low signature requirements for initiatives and petitions, both of which were in fact first introduced by Schleswig‐Holstein in 1990, did not meet with universal approval. Even more controversial were certain provisions in the Land constititions, for example, Brandenburg, that probably violate the Basic Law, and a number of unenforceable social rights and state goals that raise questions about feasibility and false expectations. This leaves us with questions about just how different from their western counterparts the constitutions in the new Lander really are and whether, given the relatively weak position of the Lander in the policy‐making process in the German federal system and the EU, their constitutional provisions matter that much.