According to the theory of government failure, nonprofit organizations emerge when governments fail to provide goods or services to a public with heterogeneous demands. This study approaches this fundamental theory of the nonprofit sector from a pluralist political viewpoint, marrying the theory of government failure to resource-driven nonprofit arguments via updated modeling and measurement strategies. This article proposes a new, conditional demand heterogeneity hypothesis, wherein the effect of demand heterogeneity on the nonprofit sector increases in the presence of increasing resources: nonprofit service delivery is most likely when those experiencing government failure have access to resources. This article is the first to test supply and demand nonprofit arguments in tandem using an interactive modeling specification and the first to operationalize demand heterogeneity using policy-based measures. I employ a finite distributed lag model with an interactive term in a time series, cross-sectional analysis of public and nonprofit land conservation in the United States. I find that nonprofit land conservation increases when citizens express greater environmental concern but only in the presence of increasing disposable income. Examining nonprofit theory within the context of land conservation provides a comparable measure of government and nonprofit service provision, controls for the nature of the good provided by these institutions, and allows for a policy-driven measure of demand heterogeneity, improving upon previous studies’ employment of diversity-based proxy measures. The results advance our understanding of how to test and measure demand heterogeneity nonprofit arguments and suggest that access to resources conditions which interests find expression in nonprofit organizations.

中文翻译：

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富人的英亩：非营利资源和需求异质性的互动模型

根据政府失灵理论，当政府无法向具有不同需求的公众提供商品或服务时，就会出现非营利组织。本研究从多元政治观点探讨非营利部门的这一基本理论，通过更新的建模和测量策略将政府失灵理论与资源驱动的非营利论点结合起来。本文提出了一个新的有条件的需求异质性假设，其中需求异质性对非营利部门的影响随着资源的增加而增加：当经历政府失败的人能够获得资源时，最有可能提供非营利服务。本文是第一个使用交互式建模规范同时测试供需非营利论点的文章，也是第一个使用基于政策的措施来操作需求异质性的文章。我采用有限分布滞后模型，在时间序列中具有交互项，对美国公共和非营利土地保护进行横截面分析。我发现，当公民表达更大的环境关注时，非营利性土地保护会增加，但只有在可支配收入增加的情况下。在土地保护的背景下检验非营利理论，可以提供政府和非营利服务提供的可比衡量标准，控制这些机构提供的商品的性质，并允许采用政策驱动的需求异质性衡量标准，改进了先前研究对基于多样性的代理措施的使用。结果促进了我们对如何测试和测量需求异质性非营利论点的理解，并表明获取资源的条件在非营利组织中得到了表达。