The study of policy narratives is challenged by inconsistencies and a need for more precise definitions and measurements. The goals of this article are to build precision and clarity in the study of policy narratives by developing a network-based approach-the ego-alter dyad-for coding characters and their interactions around a policy issue and then to illustrate this approach in the analysis of air and climate issues in Delhi, India. The empirical results show that (1) the same actors are often heroes and villains, (2) heroes and villains are associated with different actions but with similar victims or beneficiaries, (3) narrators differ in their propensity to tell hero-heavy or villain-heavy policy narratives, and (4) the proportion of hero-heavy or villain-heavy policy narratives changes over time and differs across subtopics. The article concludes with a research agenda for further theoretical and methodological advancement in studying policy narratives.

Prior research on policy conflicts indicates a tendency among policy actors to misperceive the influence of actors engaged in policy debates based on the degree of distance between their relative policy positions. This research develops a measure for assessing the degree and direction of the misperception effect. This measure is then utilized as a dependent variable to assess the relationship between theoretically relevant factors and the degree to which actors will exaggerate the influence of their opponents and allies. The research uses original survey data of policy actors engaged in the debate over hydraulic fracturing in New York. The results indicate misperceptions of relative influence are prevalent and most associated with the experience of a policy loss and holding relatively extreme policy beliefs. The findings provide new insight into factors that influence the demonization of political opponents. These insights are timely in the context of polarized debates over environmental and energy policy in the United States.

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Most nonprofits lack a true endowment and endowment wealth is concentrated in a relatively small number of organizations and subsectors. This study supports an operational definition of material endowment, equal to or greater than annual expenses, and investigates how common it is for a nonprofit to establish a meaningful endowment over time. Specifically, we address whether the sector's enthusiasm over the potential of endowment building is reflected in charitable organizations' experiences. Using financial data, we find that building a meaningful permanent endowment is a rare achievement among public charities over a period of two decades. Meaningful endowment creation, achieved by less than 2% of the sample, is more common for organizations with donor attachments, the need for subsidization of mission services, those with more fundraising costs, and those with more donative revenue portfolios.

This paper explores issues concerning endowment building, endowment management, and the general perceptions of endowment through the views of leaders of nonprofits that built an endowment. We find that endowment is generally considered meaningful to nonprofit leaders when it provides at least 5% of an organization's annual budget. The initiative for building endowment largely comes from boards of directors, executive directors, or some combination of both. However, external actors—especially foundations—play critical roles. The source of funds for endowments mostly come from major gifts including bequests, even though these gifts often were not solicited. Endowments serve a range of functions for organizations and do seem to alter organizational behavior and outcomes as suggested by the existing literature. Endowment aids organizational sustainability by supporting some reasonable level of annual operating costs. Many nonprofits use the flexibility and freeing up of resources provided by endowment funds for innovation, program enhancement, capacity building, and risk taking. For better or worse, endowments become a key part of a virtuous cycle of legitimacy where the nonprofits' accomplishments, relationships, and reputation attract resources to support activities in perpetuity, thus creating a more capable, stable, and accomplished organization to which additional support is more easily drawn.