Faith-based nonprofits and the delivery of public services: An experimental study of sector-bias

Johnson, Austin P., Meier, Kenneth J. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6378-0855 and Geva, Nehhemia 2024. Faith-based nonprofits and the delivery of public services: An experimental study of sector-bias. Journal of Policy Studies

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Abstract

Worldwide many public services are delivered by nonprofit organizations, both secular and faith based. The reliance on nonprofits for service delivery is especially prominent in the provision of relief efforts in response to natural and human-caused disasters. Although there is a growing literature on sector bias (public, private and nonprofit) in public service delivery, the role of faith based nonprofits has generally been ignored in the despite their prominence in practice. Using two randomized experiments involving US subjects focused on the delivery of humanitarian aid to Somalia, we examine the question of bias in the evaluation of performance based on the type of organization delivering the service. The first experiment contrasts government delivery of aid versus that provided by denomination based organizations or generic faith based organizations that are nondenominational. The second experiment varies the denominational affiliation of faith based nonprofits to examine those that are Methodist, Catholic, or Muslim. We find that US residents view faith based nonprofits as less effective than secular nonprofits; but there is no bias in terms of discounting performance information based on which type of organization was delivering the services. The second experiment showed that there were no differences in assessment based on the denominational affiliation of the nonprofit and no biases in discounting performance. The implications of these findings for the delivery of public services are then discussed.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	In Press
Schools:	Business (Including Economics)
Publisher:	Seoul National University
ISSN:	2799-9130
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	14 October 2024
Date of Acceptance:	21 August 2024
Last Modified:	27 Nov 2024 15:45
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/172279

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