Editors’ Note: Jeffrey M. Berry, James M. Glaser, and Deborah J. Schildkraut outline the findings on the relationship between political ideology and charitable giving from their recent book, Everyday Democracy: Liberals, Conservatives, and Their Routine Political Lives (University of Chicago Press, 2025). (Project research assistant Alex Landy is also pictured on the computer screen in the authors’ photo.)
The challenges facing nonprofits seem to be growing exponentially. The Trump administration’s sharp turn toward a smaller federal government has led to broad cutbacks in grant programs that many nonprofits rely on. The Administration’s attack on universities is just one of the developments that is shrinking employment in the nonprofit sector. Recently the IRS announced the formation of a unit intended to uncover “criminal conduct”by liberal nonprofits. And if these aren’t enough plagues on nonprofits, the weakening economy is driving a growing demand for services from human service providers.
All these developments have placed ever greater pressure on nonprofits to raise more money from their donors. But in the highly polarized political environment we live in today, the question arises as to what we know about the relationship of political identity to donor behavior. Using the tools of survey research, we set out to examine this interrelationship.
A Polarized Nation
American politics is always contentious—there’s never been a period where we all got along in a consistently civil manner. Still, the polarization today is greater than it has been in recent history, and nonprofits are increasingly caught in the downdraft of conflict between liberals and conservatives. This is no small development as nonprofits have traditionally been regarded as the embodiment of a good and caring society, and both liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, have generally supported them in a nonpartisan fashion.
As it has with so many other things, the Trump administration has severed the past from the present. Previous Republican presidents have not presented themselves as antagonistic toward nonprofits. Ronald Reagan campaigned on a promise to restore “the American spirit of voluntary service.” As president he created an office in the White House to promote public-private partnerships. When he became president, George H.W. Bush spoke rapturously about a “thousand points of light,” a metaphor for the diversity of a nonprofit sector that enriches all types of American communities. He also created a Commission on National and Community Service. The second George Bush formed an Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in the White House. There has been no equivalent initiative from the Trump administration, nor from Republicans in Congress. Instead, nonprofits thought to be unfriendlyto their goals have been a target of Trump’s wrath.
Our data on the politics of charity come from a larger research project that culminated with the recent publication of our book, Everyday Democracy: Liberals, Conservatives, and Their Routine Political Lives (University of Chicago Press, 2025). This work is a study of the ordinary behaviors of citizens that we believe are at the foundation of a healthy democratic society. One of the behaviors we examined is the simple act of giving to charity. We asked a random sample of 1,000 Americans an entire battery of questions about donating to charity and volunteering for nonprofits. This robust dataset allowed us to analyze fundamental questions about how people value the nonprofit sector.
Liberal Hypocrisy?
We frame our analysis through the prism of ideology, comparing those identifying as conservative with those saying they are liberal. “Ideology” refers to belief systems with some relative degree of consistency in political attitudes and values. Here we ask how ideology and personal decisions about charity are interconnected. It is easy for all of us to say we support nonprofits, but how is such support manifested, if at all? Does ideology provide principled guidance for behavior, or is charitable giving more driven by other factors? In this sense, we test whether ideology has any impact at all on charitable behavior.
Our initial focus is on how liberals and conservatives compare in the likelihood they give to charity, what kind of nonprofits they give to, and how much they contribute. Most survey research only asks about donations to nonprofits in general. In contrast, the survey instrument we constructed listed four different categories of nonprofits: religious congregations and other religious organizations; health, disease, and disability nonprofits; social service organizations; and a residual “other” category that was described with examples of community-based nonprofits.
Scholarship on ideology and charity is scant but one of the most provocative studies on the subject, Arthur Brooks’ Who Really Cares (2006), intrigued us. Brooks, an economist, measured charitable activity and used multivariate analysis to determine that conservatives were significantly more generous than liberals.[i] This is certainly a plausible finding, but Brooks’ explanation was notable because it was characterological in nature: liberals, said Brooks, were hypocrites. He concluded that they argue for generous support for those in need but seem to believe that it should be funded by taxpayers and not by their own charity. Brooks writes, “These are, perhaps, the most common stereotypes in our modern American political discourse: the political left is compassionate and charitable toward the less fortunate, but the political right is oblivious to suffering.” Throughout the book Brooks castigates liberals for their failure to “stand up for charity.”
Since its publication, Brooks’ methodology has been challenged by many social scientists, though often in ways that do not fully engage the fundamental substance of his “Who Really Cares” query. Our large-scale survey, on the other hand, allowed us to test Brooks’ conclusion in several ways that took on that question. The survey instrument began by asking respondents to tell us if they contributed to each of the four types of nonprofits and, if so, how much they donated. In the accompanying figure, our results show the opposite of the conclusion drawn by Brooks: it is liberals who are more likely to give to charity, not conservatives. Liberals are more likely to contribute to organizations in the three secular nonprofit sectors while conservatives are more likely to give to religious congregations. Liberals are much less likely to belong to a congregation so there is little mystery as to why they are much less likely to donate to churches and other religious congregations. Brooks also said his multivariate analysis demonstrated that being conservative is what leads to greater charitable activity, not being religious. This turns out to be wrong, too. Our multivariate analysis indicates that for conservatives, religion, not ideology, is the more important causal link to charity. Similarly, liberal ideology is not statistically linked to a greater propensity to donate to secular nonprofits. (For a more detailed elaboration of our statistical analysis of what leads to charitable behavior, please consult Everyday Democracy.)
In sum, what we found in breaking down the donor population by ideology is that liberals are more likely to donate to nonprofits than conservatives. But when we use multivariate methods to peel back the onion to get at the core of donor motivations, ideology washes out: neither identification as a liberal nor as a conservative is linked to the likelihood of donating. Age, household income, and church attendance are the variables most strongly related to donating to charity.
In terms of how much liberals and conservatives give to charity, we again analyzed the data by nonprofit sector rather than by a single aggregate pattern. In terms of donations to religious organizations, conservatives are far more generous. They donated an average of $1,926 in this sector in the previous 12 months. In contrast, the smaller cohort of liberals who donated to religious congregation or other religious nonprofits gave just $1,015. The opposite pattern is true for donations to the nonprofits in the three secular categories. Liberals gave an average of $669 during the past year to secular nonprofits while conservatives donated $438.
The Role of Values
Searching further for the roots of charitable behavior we presented respondents with a straightforward set of questions about why they give. Our base question asked: what are the reasons “for your decision to donate to a charitable organization in the past 12 months?” Respondents were presented with 10 choices and were instructed that they could select up to three items. Four of the alternatives related to values: “I feel compassion toward people in need,” “I feel better helping those less fortunate than me,” “I want to support a cause or community that is important to me,” and “my religious beliefs place a high value on donating to charity.” As it turned out, these were the only four responses of the ten that received a significant positive response.
Liberals and conservatives both respond strongly to these values prompts but not identically. Liberals are more moved by feeling compassion and supporting a cause. Conservatives respond most strongly to religious beliefs.
Ideological sentiment and values are not the same. Again, ideology refers to a broad and interrelated political world view. Values are more representative of an internal compass, attitudes and emotions that guide our personal behavior. And in the end, we conclude that it is personal values, not political ideology, that lie at the root of the motivation to support nonprofits.
-Jeffrey M. Berry, James M. Glaser, and Deborah J. Schildkraut
Jeffrey M. Berry is Emeritus Professor of Political Science, Tufts University. His books include The Outrage Industry (Oxford University Press, 2013). James M. Glaser is Executive Vice President and Provost, and Professor of Political Science at Santa Clara University. His most recent book is Changing Minds, if Not Hearts: Political Remedies for Racial Conflict (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). Deborah J. Schildkraut is John Richard Skuse Professor of Political Science at Tufts University. Her most recent book is States of Belonging: Immigration Policies, Attitudes, and Inclusion (Russell Sage Foundation, 2021).
[i] For a sophisticated and critical assessment of Brooks’ methodology, see Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), pp. 662-63.
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