To what extent do resource flows to Canadian charities from governments reflect shared social identities?

The Canadian charitable sector is a good site for examining identities and their relationships to policy because the sector is heterogeneous, reflecting diverse causes and identities, and it includes formalized elements of interest groups and social movements. Emerging research (for example Chapman (2019) and Mehta (2016), is pointing in the direction of a relationship- or identity-first model for how resources flow into charitable sector organizations and, by extension, how charitable sectors grow, the ways they interact with other institutions, and the roles they play in communities. Individual and organizational identities, the alignment of identity between charities and political actors, and the ability of networks of organizations to form and express a common identity, may have something to do with how resources are allocated in charitable sectors. Hornung, Bandelow, and Vogeler’s (2019) concept of Social Identities in Policy Process (SIPP) are a key part of the theoretical framework: it is the formation of common views on policy content within a social group which then shape actor behaviour so that it benefits the in-group. While the SIPP definition focuses on policy actors and policy processes, I apply it here to charitable sector actors and processes within sector organizations. In this study, I ask: how does government funding for charities change following elections? This question examines the extent to which identity-based clusters exist around public funders who are expected to be explicitly partisan in some of their resource allocation decisions. Using existing charitable tax return (T3010) panel data and government grants data, and controlling for provincial and federal riding characteristics and partisanship, overall government spending levels, and overall macroeconomic conditions, is there large-scale evidence of ideological or identity-based alignment between specific charitable subsectors or organizational clusters and parties and, if there is evidence, what are the effects of alignment? This is a question that can be uniquely addressed in Canada because of the availability, depth, and detail of administrative data from charity tax returns, which includes a breakdown of the amount coming from each order of government. This research uses quantitative methods and Canadian public data on charities and political actors; so, the relationships and shared identities that I will be looking at will have to be those that appear in public data. While there are a few ways that people can engage with organizations, only a few types of engagement are publicly reported: board membership, gifts from foundations, and grants from government. Additionally, lists of political donors and candidate lists are publicly available in Canada and have been aggregated by others, while other types of shared identities like religious affiliations and club memberships are not. For this reason, I look at the intersection of political identity (people who have an affiliation to a party through donating, standing for an election, or holding office) and resource flows and board memberships (as proxies for relationships) in charities to examine the effect that being on the inside of a political relationship has on a charity (as compared to being on the outside) and to examine how different political parties (as a proxy for different political identities) affect these effects.