Complementary or Supplementary? The Relationship Between Government Size and Nonprofit Sector Size

• Published in: Voluntas (Manchester, England) Vol. 29; no. 3; pp. 454 - 469
• Main Authors: Lu, Jiahuan, Xu, Chengxin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer Science+Business Media, LLC (Springer) 01.06.2018; Springer US; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Ambiguity; Business government relations; Government; Leverage; Locality; Meta-analysis; Nonprofit organizations; Original Paper; Political Science; Social Policy; Social Sciences; Studies; Nonprofit sector growth; Nonprofit sector size; Government–nonprofit relations; Meta-analysis
• ISSN: 0957-8765; 1573-7888
• DOI: 10.1007/s11266-018-9981-2

Do government activities discourage or leverage nonprofit activities? The extant literature has proposed competing lines of arguments, making the net effect ambiguous. The present study conducts a meta-analysis to synthesize extant studies concerning the relationship between the level of government activities and the level of nonprofit activities within a locality and explore potential moderating effects. Through systematically reviewing 30 extant studies, the study finds a mostly positive association between the level of government activities and the level of nonprofit activities, but this relationship is generally weak and sometimes statistically insignificant. In addition, the moderator analysis concludes that data structure, unit of analysis, and field of activity significantly moderate effect size estimates across extant studies. Overall, the net relationship between the level of government activities and the level of nonprofit activities within a locality ranges from null to slight positive. Government activities generally seem not to discourage nonprofit activities, but may slightly leverage them.