Is there a way to measure if nonprofits are affected by the political party of the current president? Assistant Professor Sam Zuhlke addresses this in her article, “Presidents and nonprofits: Illustrating compositional modeling of the U.S. nonprofit sector,” recently published in Social Science Quarterly.

U.S. nonprofit organizations sit at the intersection of politics and policy and many major theories discuss nonprofits’ interactions with government. Zuhlke shows how a dynamic pie modeling strategy can be used to demonstrate how federal politics, measured as changes in presidential partisanship, affect the composition of the nonprofit sector. This model utilizes newer avenues which are being used to collect nonprofit data and applies compositional modeling to better reflect existing theoretical questions, while also advancing the types of questions researchers are able to ask. In her article, Zuhlke uses compositional modeling to investigate the relationship between federal politics and nonprofit organizations. She finds that theoretically, politics may play a greater role in the nonprofit sector than scholars currently give credence to. 

Read more about the details of this research in the full article.