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.

Human Rights INGOs, LGBT INGOs,

As the world society is increasingly populated by illiberal actors, is it possible the mechanisms once used to explain compliance with liberal normative standards are now influential in explaining defiance to them? I investigate this question by examining how integration into the world society via rival pro- and anti-LGBT networks influences the expansion and contraction of LGBT rights from 1990-2018. Through extensive original data, I use time series, cross-sectional and multinomial models to showcase how global LGBT norms can spur defiance and backlash – not just compliance. Moreover, the relative strength of these rival networks is associated with policy changes in alignment with that networks’ preferences. This study contributes to our understanding of the changing international system by revealing how illiberal actors simultaneously co-opt and subvert the mechanisms built by the liberal world society to advance illiberal outcomes.

Despite years of success, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) norms are becoming increasingly polarized across the global landscape—with some countries strongly complying with new expectations while others openly defy them. To explain these divergent paths, I investigate the transmission of global LGBT norms via two mechanisms: transnational advocacy networks and foreign aid conditionalities. In examining LGBT policy adoption across 110 non-Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries between 1990 and 2016, I find evidence that the process through which states are exposed to LGBT norms can indeed help explain these different approaches. Exposure to LGBT norms through transnational advocacy networks enhances the effect of these norms and is associated with more progressive policy adoption, while greater dependence on foreign aid pushes states to reject LGBT norms. Consequently, this study provides new insights into how the mechanism through which countries are exposed to norms shapes compliance and adds new evidence questioning the effectiveness of foreign aid as a tool to advance LGBT rights.

Existing scholarship documents large worldwide increases in women’s participation in the public sphere over recent decades, for example, in education, politics, and the labor force. Some scholars have argued that these changes follow broader trends in world society, especially its growing liberalism, which increasingly has reconfigured social life around the choices of empowered and rights-bearing individuals, regardless of gender. Very recently, however, a variety of populisms and nationalisms have emerged to present alternatives to liberalism, including in the international arena. We explore here their implications for women’s participation in public life. We use cross-national data to analyze changes in women’s participation in higher education, the polity, and the economy 1970–2017. We find that women’s participation on average continues to expand over this period, but there is evidence of a growing cross-national divergence. In most domains, women’s participation tends to be lower in countries linked to illiberal international organizations, especially in the recent-most period.