Nonprofits:A Public Policy Tool for the Promotion of Community Subjective Well-being

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Ressler, Robert W.; Paxton, Pamela; Velasco, Kristopher; Pivnick, Lilla; Weiss, Inbar; Eichstaedt, Johannes C.
• 署名单位: Brandeis University; University of Texas System; University of Texas Austin; Stanford University
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION RESEARCH AND THEORY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1053-1858
• DOI: 10.1093/jopart/muab010
• 发表日期: 2021
• 页码: 822-838
• 关键词: for-profit; advocacy organizations; Social media; GOVERNMENT; HEALTH; sector; happiness; twitter; IMPACT; GROWTH

摘要

Looking to supplement common economic indicators, politicians and policymakers are increasingly interested in how to measure and improve the subjective well-being of communities.Theories about nonprofit organizations suggest that they represent a potential policy-amenable lever to increase community subjective well-being. Using longitudinal cross-lagged panel models with IRS and Twitter data, this study explores whether communities with higher numbers of nonprofits per capita exhibit greater subjective well-being in the form of more expressions of positive emotion, engagement, and relationships. We find associations, robust to sample bias concerns, between most types of nonprofit organizations and decreases in negative emotions, negative sentiments about relationships, and disengagement. We also find an association between nonprofit presence and the proportion of words tweeted in a county that indicate engagement. These findings contribute to our theoretical understanding of why nonprofit organizations matter for community-level outcomes and how they should be considered an important public policy lever.