Jesse D. Lecy

• PhD in Social Science / Public Policy
• Professor (Associate) at Arizona State University

NGO/NPO effectiveness remains a prominent concern for scholars and practitioners, but the literature on this issue is increasingly fragmented along disciplinary lines. We address this problem by presenting a comprehensive and interdisciplinary review of the literature on NGO and NPO effectiveness using citation analysis. In order to uncover commona...

Network-focused research in public administration has expanded rapidly over the past two decades. This rapid growth has created come confusion about terminology and approaches to research in the field. We organize the network literature in public administration using compact citation networks to identify coherent subdomains focused on (1) policy fo...

Theories of nonprofit density have assumed a variety of dispositions toward the state, including opposition, suspicion, indifference, and mutual dependence. In this article, we conduct the first large-scale simultaneous empirical test of the two most prominent nonprofit theories: government failure theory and interdependence theory. The former char...

The nonprofit starvation cycle is a debilitating trend of under-investment in organizational infrastructure that is fed by potentially misleading financial reporting and donor expectations of increasingly low overhead expenses. Since its original reporting in 2008, the phenomenon has been referenced several times, but seldom explored empirically; t...

Public administration research has documented a shift in the locus of discretion away from street-level bureaucrats to “systems-level bureaucracies” as a result of new information communication technologies that automate bureaucratic processes, and thus shape access to resources and decisions around enforcement and punishment. Advances in artificia...

Newly released data on 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations’ lobbying expenditures shows that these organizations have increasingly engaged in lobbying over the past several decades. However, over roughly the same period, states have adopted increasingly stringent lobbying regulations. While often promoted as a way to curb the influence of private int...

This research examines differences in the compensation of male and female executive directors and chief financial officers in nonprofit organizations. We utilize executive transition periods within organizations as an empirical strategy for isolating how gender impacts the salaries of two people who occupy the same role in the same organization. Tw...

Like most other goods and services, accounting information has both producers and consumers. Significant investments have been made in quality control on the production side including the rigor of accounting credentialing, advances in new methodologies such as accrual accounting, and standardization of record-keeping and reporting through regulator...

This study examines the impact of federal grant awards on the financial health of recipient nonprofits. Although a modest body of research finds that government grants are beneficial to nonprofit fiscal health, a large Urban Institute study (2010, 2013, 2015) found that nonprofit managers receiving government grants consistently report fiscal harm...

This paper charts the rapid rise of data science methodologies in manuscripts published in top journals for third sector scholarship, indicating their growing importance to research in the field. We draw on critical quantitative theory (QuantCrit) to challenge the assumed neutrality of data science insights that are especially prone to misrepresent...

National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities (NTEE) codes have become the primary classifier of nonprofit missions since they were developed in the mid-1980s in response to growing demands for a taxonomy of nonprofit activities (Herman in Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 19(3):293–306, 1990, Barman in Social Science History 37:103–141, 2013). Howev...

The nonprofit organizational life cycle literature has traditionally focused on the entry and exit processes; the intermediate organizational life stages between these bookends have received less attention. Almost half of all nonprofits at any given time operate in an early life stage with less than US$100,000 in revenue, minimal overhead spending,...

There is evidence of meaningful gender differences in behaviors, resources, and outcomes for traditional and social entrepreneurs. We examine if these differences exist among nonprofit entrepreneurs—those who found organizations in a sector where women outnumber men and the activities of many nonprofits are perceived as feminine. Using survey data...

Local nongovernmental organizations (local NGOs) based in less economically advanced countries suffer from a “liability of foreignness” in attracting international funding: They are geographically, linguistically, and culturally distant from funders in more economically advanced countries. As a result, although U.S. foundations gave 27,572 grants t...

This paper examines the use of the nonprofit organizational form to mitigate the impact of incomplete contracts in the public sector Transaction costs economics (TCE) predicts that the expense of incomplete contracts will rise with contract complexity and asset specificity. Previous research shows that government agencies increase their use cost-pl...

Nonprofit missions reflect the values of those that create, manage, and support them. We know that the U.S. population has undergone a “big sort” that has resulted in increased community homogeneity along racial, economic, and political lines. We do not know, however, how this process has impacted the nonprofit sector, as there is little work looki...

BackgroundA recent review of frameworks used in dissemination and implementation (D&I) science described 61 judged to be related either to dissemination, implementation, or both. The current use of these frameworks and their contributions to D&I science more broadly has yet to be reviewed. For these reasons, our objective was to determine the role...

This article reviews the Federal Assistance Award Data System (FAADS), a comprehensive online archive of federal grant activity. Relatively few nonprofit scholars have used this extensive data source due to significant structural limitations in the data. This article aims to describe and mitigate those limitations while stimulating new research on...

The study of post-conflict justice and peace incorporates ideas from many disciplines and on a range of topics including justice, reconciliation, democratization, and peace. While diversity is valuable, it can also lead to confusion in theory and practice and so requires close evaluation of how diverse ideas interact, and to what end. This paper be...

This article empirically addresses the effects of network embeddedness on nonprofit organizations’ ability to access financial resources within competitive markets, with a focus in this analysis on the acquisition of foundation grants. We test theory on the role of organizational status in competitive markets using data from a network of nonprofits...

This article looks at the impact of meta-analysis and then explores why meta-analysis was developed at the time and by the scholars it did in the social sciences in the 1970s. For the first problem, impact, it examines the impact of meta-analysis using citation network analysis. The impact is seen in the sciences, arts and humanities, and on such c...

Annually, United States federal agencies issue procurement contracts worth five hundred billion dollars. Less than four percent of these were awarded to nonprofit organizations. This paper advances our understanding federal procurement practices by analyzing data from the Federal Procurement Data System. We isolate federal programs that choose betw...

In the last three decades, armed conflict has increasingly been fought among civilian populations, resulting in greater physical and mental tolls. Soldiers returning from combat with psychological trauma are now receiving medical and policy attention for reintegration into the workforce. However, there is little attention on the impacts and options...

This paper introduces nonprofit scholars to the Federal Assistance Award Data System (FAADS), an online archive which contains the full universe of federal grant activity. Relatively little academic research has used this extensive data source. The paper profiles federal grant flows to the nonprofit sector over a ten year period. From the FAADS dat...

To shed light on the inner workings of policymaking in North Korea, this study examined the process behind economic policy change through an analysis of the official state economics journal. Semantic networks are used to trace the introduction and evolution of policies during four distinct economic periods in North Korean history between 1986 and 2...

We present here a new method for literature reviews that utilizes citation network analysis from academic databases. Special attention is paid to the construction of the citation network in order to ensure that the sample contains key publications in the field. Keyword searches in databases can be misleading because keywords are not used consistent...

Network-focused research in public administration has expanded rapidly over the past two decades. This rapid growth has created come confusion about terminology and approaches to research in the field. We organize the network literature in public administration using compact citation networks to identify coherent subdomains focused on policy format...

After more than a decade of research in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere, there is continued debate on the definitions of social enterprise, specifically in classifying populations. Several schools of thought contest the territory. The EMES network in Europe argues that there is an ideal type of social enterprise to which all social enterprise ventur...

This paper empirically addresses the effects that the network embeddedness of nonprofit organizations has on their ability to access philanthropic resources within competitive markets. Implicit in many criticisms of institutional philanthropy is the normative belief that nonprofits that are not ‘in’ the existing networks of foundation boards and st...

The nonprofit sector has been expanding rapidly, but little attention has been paid to the organizations that comprise the group of new market entrants. In 2010 more than 45,000 new nonprofits incorporated, braving crowded grant markets and grueling periods of organizational adolescence. Some reach revenues over $1 million within a couple of years....

The nonprofit starvation cycle is a debilitating trend of under-investment in organizational infrastructure that is fed by potentially misleading financial reporting and donor expectations of increasingly low overhead expenses. Since its original reporting in 2008, the phenomenon has been referenced several times, but seldom explored empirically; t...

Public health services and systems research (PHSSR) is the field of study charged with evaluating the public health system. PHSSR currently lacks a clear identity integrating the many theories, approaches, and disciplines contributing to the field. Experts in PHSSR were consulted to identify 11 key published PHSSR studies. With these articles as a...

Effectiveness as a measure of organizational success has for decades attracted scholarly attention across many social science disciplines. For non-governmental and not-for-profit organizations (NGOs/NPOs) in the United States, the question of effectiveness has recently gained urgency as a growing number of rating agencies and watchdogs have gained...

Advocacy organizations are viewed as actors motivated primarily by principled beliefs. This volume outlines a new agenda for the study of advocacy organizations, proposing a model of NGOs as collective actors that seek to fulfil normative concerns and instrumental incentives, face collective action problems, and compete as well as collaborate with...

Transnational NGOs (TNGOs) are increasingly visible and influential actors in global affairs. Although academics and the general public are today more aware of TNGO activity today than a decade ago, our understanding of how TNGO leaders understand their roles in global politics remains limited. Scholarship on this topic has often been driven by ind...

While the activities of transnational NGOs are today regular subject of academic study, our understanding of their basic workings and motives remains limited. Scholarship has often been focused on individual case studies of prominent organizations and successful campaigns within specific sectors, a bias limiting the generalizability of claims. Much...

While the activities of transnational NGOs are today regular subject of academic study, our understanding of their basic workings and motives remains limited. Scholarship has often been focused on individual case studies of prominent organizations and successful campaigns within specific sectors, a bias limiting the generalizability of claims. Much...

Transnational NGOs (TNGOs) are increasingly visible and influential actors in global affairs. Although academics and the general public are today more aware of TNGO activity today than a decade ago, our understanding of how TNGO leaders understand their roles in global politics remains limited. Scholarship on this topic has often been driven by ind...

Explanations for poverty have often tended to focus on momentous, especially calamitous, events. In this analysis we show how households’ longer-term economic fortunes are more significantly influenced by a succession of quotidian, recurring, and comparatively minor events. Rather than any single event, it is the balance of positive and negative ev...

Disaster relief is a notoriously complex task and often achieves unsatisfactory results. Recent data from the district of Kutch in Gujarat, India shows that poverty rates fell after the severe earthquake of 2001. This paper hypothesizes a relationship between the poverty trends and disaster relief efforts in Gujarat. It then explores the unique fea...