Civil servants' preferences for nonprofit contractors: A conjoint analysis

Abstract

Although governments frequently contract nonprofit organizations (NPOs) to provide public services, little is known about why civil servants are more willing to direct funding to some NPOs than to others. Based on previous research on government funding for NPOs, this study proposes a theoretical framework that combines NPOs' internal and external management strategies to explain civil servants' preferences for funding specific NPOs. On the basis of an original conjoint experiment of 1206 civil servants from China between 2020 and 2021, the analysis found that civil servants generally value the characteristics of rationalization, professionalization, collaboration, cooptation, and a prior history of receiving funding from the government in NPOs. A series of robustness checks were used to validate the theorized relationships. These findings have important implications for both future research and efforts to promote government–NPO contracting.

The origins and consequences of administrative burdens in mass immunization programs: Experimental evidence based on the monkeypox outbreak

“…Conjoint analysis has been widely used to estimate consumer preferences since the 1970s (Green & Rao, 1971). In recent years, it has become an increasingly popular tool in public policy research investigating citizens' or bureaucrats' preferences on issues such as immigration, political selection, outsourcing, and bureaucrat recruitment (Hainmueller & Hopkins, 2015;Hemker & Rink, 2017;Jilke & Tummers, 2018;Liu, 2019;Oliveros & Schuster, 2018;Yang & Zhao, 2022;Zhang & Shao, 2022). This experimental design has also been used to examine factors influencing COVID-19 vaccine acceptance (Kreps & Kriner, 2021;Motta, 2021).…”