Changes in government funding for charities following elections 2000-2020: Canada and the UK

This project on government funding to charities, asks: how does government funding for charities change following elections? This study focuses on change in response to change from 2000-2020: when governments change, which charities see new funding, which see a funding change that is larger than overall patterns in government spending and transfers to charity, and which charities lose funding? This question is directly related to the questions for public policy on the roles of charities, as service delivery agents, are affected by and responding to increasing political polarization. This project links publicly available datasets on charity finances (UK: data from Companies House, The Charity Commission, Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator, and the Charity Commission for Northern Ireland; Canada: Canada Revenue Agency T3010 data) together with publicly available information on elections from electoral authorities and publicly available information on government grants, contributions, contracts, and donations. The results are a comparative analysis, testing findings from each province in Canada with those in each of the constituent countries (England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland) of the UK. Canada and the UK are both multi-party countries that use Westminster-style governments, meaning that polarization in both settings is multi-polar with different parties accessing different poles over time. Canadian polarization over this period is largely along regional lines, with alienation in the west and anglo-franco tensions in Quebec featuring prominently. UK polarization is a mixture of historical regional, class, and religious divides that affect contemporary issues like the devolution of powers, Brexit, and Scottish independence. As governments navigate these issues, and as parties vie for power, they are expected to both use charities to appease identity-based groups and to access blocs of voters (Dougherty, 2024; Salamon et al., 2017; Zuhlke, 2021). Scholars of nonprofit leadership and management who study organizational resilience - and who have largely focused on internal organizational conditions - will be interested in findings that add to emerging conversations about when and under what conditions changing external political conditions and non-financial relationships affect organizational resources flows and, ultimately, organizational survival. For policy makers, this project will also contribute to current conversations about the ‘shrinking space’ for civil society organizations (like charities) in the UK and internationally with the potential to identify which spaces for civil society are shrinking under what political pressures. There is also the potential to identify causes or networks that have stable (or expanding) space to pursue their work and engage with policy processes.