DTAP: Balancing Trust and Accountability: Charities, Government, and Society

Nonprofit organizations play multiple and sometimes conflicting roles in a democracy: they represent many views but can also provide services at the direction of government. Public trust in charities has decreased over recent years in many countries, but little research explains why. This project utilizes The Trans-Atlantic Partnership call on Democracy, Governance and Trust (DGT) to study cross-sector opinions on trust and accountability.

The research team seeks to understand the variation in regulatory approaches, interpersonal trust, and popular sentiment toward public-serving institutions using the mutual perceptions of four audiences: operating charities, foundations, government agencies, and the public. Findings will provide useful guidance for regulators, charity workers, and donors on the broader role of regulation and democratic participation in society by documenting obstacles within or across national boundaries.

The study has four phases that allow for multiple levels of comparison between audiences, geographies, and conditions such as exposure to other groups. We also allow for opinions to change, which stands in contrast to most of the cross-sectional survey work that dominates the field. In the first phase, each team will conduct an extensive document review to create historical-institutional profiles, including the scope of the nonprofit sector and relevant socio-cultural norms such as institutional trust toward the nonprofit, private, and public sectors.

In the second phase, teams will convene both single-audience focus groups and mixed-audience Delphi groups to gather novel data. The third phase will produce practice-oriented reports, while the fourth phase involves academic book and article production and contains a conference event that serves not only to share knowledge, but serves as another round of data gathering to document opinion shift and further study the influence of peer learning on trust, accountability, and governance.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.