CONSTRUCTING THE CAUSE: THE ROLE OF THIRD-PARTY FUNDERS IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF MEXICAN AMERICAN INTEREST GROUP ADVOCACY
Embargo until
2020-05-01
Date
2018-01-25
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Johns Hopkins University
Abstract
For the last 25 years, scholars have raised alarms over the disappearance of local civic membership organizations since the 1960s and a concomitant explosion of third-party-funded, staff-dominated, professional advocacy organizations. This change is said to contribute to long-term declines in civic and political participation, particularly among minorities and low income Americans, and by extension, diminished electoral fortunes of the Democratic Party. Rather than mobilize mass publics and encourage their political participation, the new, largely progressive advocacy groups finance themselves independently through foundation grant money and do most of their work in Washington where they seek behind the scenes influence with unelected branches of government. However, in seeking to understand this transition “from membership to advocacy,” most current scholarship focuses on the socio-political factors that made it possible. We have little understanding of the internal dynamics sustaining individual organizations themselves to account for why outside-funded groups are able to emerge and thrive or the ways in which dependence on external subsidies alters their operating incentives.
To address this hole in the literature, the dissertation engages in a theory-building effort through a case study analysis of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), founded in 1968. Drawing on archival materials from MALDEF and its primary benefactor, the Ford Foundation, the dissertation opens the black box of internal decision-making to understand in real time how resource dependence on non-beneficiaries shaped the maintenance calculus of its leaders and in turn, group behavior. Traditional interest group scholarship focuses on fundraising as the sole maintenance challenge facing their leaders, one fulfilled by recruiting dues-paying members. The dissertation, however, shows how fundraising from third-parties weakens their representational claim, creating a new maintenance challenge. The grievances of ostensible constituents are all too capable generating controversies over an organization’s legitimacy. Thus, as a matter of survival, leaders are incentivized to limit their exposure to nominal constituents in order to avoid legitimacy challenges. In so doing, groups are drawn ever closer to norms and expectations of foundation patrons and both the professional and party networks in which they operate.
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Keywords
Mexican Americans, Interest Groups, Civil Rights, Public Interest Law