Citizen Participation and NGO Strategy: A Survey Experiment-Based Approach to Understanding Chinese NGO Volunteer Engagement Open Access
Wilson, Miranda (Spring 2025)
Abstract
Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) play an important role in many societies by providing resources, addressing community needs, and raising public awareness about important issues. It is especially interesting to consider the role of civil society in authoritarian regimes like China, where political advocacy is often repressed. Volunteers are an instrumental part of ensuring that NGOs function effectively, and NGOs should consider how they can best recruit volunteers. This study investigates how NGO strategy plays a role in potential volunteer engagement in China. Previous research has focused on the growing presence of civil society in China but less on the variable of NGO strategy and how that might impact volunteers’ willingness to engage. My study aims to fill this gap, offering empirical results intended to shape how NGOs in authoritarian contexts should frame their strategy to recruit volunteers.
I planned to conduct a survey experiment in China to test how potential volunteers respond to three different NGO strategies – welfare, research, and advocacy. Survey respondents would have been shown one of four possible vignettes (three treatment and one control), assigned randomly, that described an NGO focused on shrinking the gender education gap in rural China. They would then have been asked to indicate their likelihood to engage with the NGO in different but increasingly committed ways, from simple interest to volunteering weekly. Drawing from political process theory and resource dependency theory, I hypothesized that the welfare NGO treatment would have the highest level of engagement, and the advocacy NGO treatment would have the lowest level of engagement, with the research NGO falling somewhere in the middle. If the data had been in favor of my hypotheses, there would be empirical evidence that NGO strategy might play a role in volunteer engagement in China, and NGOs should consider this when framing their organization to potential volunteers. If the data had not been in favor of my hypotheses, strategy might not play as large of a role in volunteer engagement as I originally assumed, and other variables should be explored to determine how volunteers choose organizations to engage with in China.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction 9
2. Literature Review 15
2.1 Overview 15
2.2 Defining NGOs and Their Strategies 16
2.3 Why do Volunteers Engage with Certain NGOs? 19
2.4 How Do Potential Volunteers Weigh NGO Strategy? 21
2.4a Political Process Theory 21
2.4b Resource Dependency Theory 25
2.4c World Society Perspective 26
2.5 Gaps and Contributions 27
3. Theory 27
3.1 Welfare-Based Strategy 28
3.2 Advocacy-Based Strategy 29
3.3 Research-Based Strategy 30
4. Research Design 31
4.1 Survey Platform 31
4.2 Survey Overview 31
4.3 Survey Design 34
4.4 Running the Survey 39
5. Results 40
5.1 Sample Demographics and Treatment Balance 42
5.2 Evaluating Treatment Effects 44
5.3 Evaluating Theoretical Assumptions 47
5.4 External Validity Discussion 49
5.5 Further Analysis 51
6. Conclusion 52
6.1 Barriers to Running the Survey 53
6.2 Evidence in Favor of the Hypothesis 55
6.3 Evidence Not in Favor of the Hypothesis 55
6.4 Improvements and Future Considerations 56
Appendix 59
Appendix A: Survey Questions in Simplified Chinese 59
Appendix B: Consent Form in Simplified Chinese 62
Bibliography 65
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