Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Nonprofit organizations that “speak for, act for, and look after the interests of their
constituents when they interact with government are, by any definition of political
science, interest groups.” Indiana’s recent implementation of the Healthy Indiana
Plan 2.0 (HIP 2.0) under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) opened a window of
opportunity to closely examine the role of nonprofits in shaping the
implementation of health care policy. Existing literature on health and human
service nonprofit organizations did not examine in depth the role and influence of
nonprofits as interest groups in the implementation of public policy. This study
examines a deeper research question that was not given adequate attention
under existing studies with a special focus on the health care policy field: whose
interest do nonprofit organizations advance when they attempt to influence the
implementation of public policy? To answer this question, it is critical to
understand why nonprofits engage in the public policy process (motivation and
values), the policy actions that nonprofits make during the implementation of the
policy (how?), and the method by which nonprofits address or mitigate conflicts
and contradictions between organizational interest and constituents’ interest
(whose interest do they advance?).
The main contribution of this study is that it sheds light on the implementation of
the largest extension of domestic social welfare policy since the “War on Poverty”
using Robert Alford’s theory of interest groups to examine the role of nonprofit
organizations during the implementation of HIP 2.0 in Indiana. Given the
complexity of the policy process, this study utilizes a qualitative methods
approach to complement existing quantitative findings. Finally, this study
provides a deeper examination of the relationships between nonprofits as actors within a policy field, accounts for the complexity of the policy and political
environment, analyzes whether or not dominant interest groups truly advance the
interest of their constituents, and provides additional insights into how nonprofits
mitigate and prioritize competing interests.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:IUPUI/oai:scholarworks.iupui.edu:1805/16262 |
| Date | 29 March 2018 |
| Creators | Qaddoura, Fady A. |
| Contributors | Burlingame, Dwight F., Benjamin, Lehn, Menachemi, Nir, Kennedy, Sheila |
| Source Sets | Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Dissertation |
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