Kelly Leroux
Biographic Data
| ID | 4386692 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kelly Leroux |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kelly |
| FAMILY NAME | Leroux |
| SIGNATURE | LEROUX K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Illinois Chicago |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2536-5682 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 574 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 30 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Timeless Tactics or Modern Misfires
Voter participation in US local elections consistently lags behind turnout rates in national elections, particularly in suburban jurisdictions. While voting reminders, or “nudges,” have been consistently linked to increased turnout in high-salience national elections, and have demonstrated promise in local elections, research on their effectiveness in these lower-salience contexts remains limited. This study uses a non-partisan, get-out-the vote …
Extending the Interdependence Theory to Local Public Service Provision
Lester Salamon’s interdependence theory has held up over time and across dozens of national contexts. However, the theory has largely been developed through data on government partnerships with nonprofits for providing social services. While government-nonprofit partnerships exist in various service areas and policy contexts, the theory has rarely been applied in less “traditional” service settings. We apply a mixed-method sequential research des…
Nonprofit Messaging and the 2020 Election
A distinct problem for American democracy is that voter participation rates remain higher among older, wealthier, and more highly educated citizens. Through their nonpartisan get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts, nonprofit organizations can help to remedy the participation gap, promoting higher turnout among under-represented voters. However, the literature reveals mixed evidence with regard to message content and its impact on turnout, and there is e…
Applying the Repertory Grid Technique to Advance Nonprofit Collaboration
A truism of modern organizational life is that organizations collaborate. They may collaborate to meet client needs, acquire resources, or gain legitimacy. They may be required to collaborate by funders, but have little direction beyond this basic mandate. In this situation, how do managers choose collaborative partners? What is important to them and when is it important? While institutional and resource-dependence theories emphasize environmenta…
Bending the arc of nonprofit leadership toward justice
Nonprofits are critical partners in the delivery of government‐funded human services in the US, but there is evidence of a persistent racial leadership gap in the sector, whereby Black and Latino Executive Directors are dramatically under‐represented. Why does this gap persist despite increased attention to this issue in recent years? And what organizational and community‐level factors do shape the likelihood that nonprofits will hire a Black or …
Exploring nonprofit dilemmas through a new lens
Experimental studies have just begun to diffuse slowly in nonprofit research, reflecting the general recognition that experimental studies can help nonprofit researchers overcome some limitations of the methods that have traditionally been used. This special issue includes four papers that consider the diversity of experimental research in nonprofit studies. First, a systematic literature review of experimental studies in fundraising provides a n…
Assessing e-government capacity to increase voter participation
Personality traits as predictors of citizen engagement with local government
Do citizens' personality traits affect their likelihood of interacting with local public officials? Using psychology's preferred approach for operationalizing personality — the "Big Five" trait framework — and two nationally-representative survey data sets from the U.S., we examine this question, and find that: (1) citizens who score higher on openness and extraversion traits have an increased likelihood of attending a local government board meet…
Entrepreneurship among Nonprofit Arts Organizations
Nonprofit entrepreneurship is largely viewed through the lens of commercialization, overshadowing other ways that entrepreneurship manifests within the sector. One such way involves nonprofits ' tendency to meet workforce needs by substituting flexible for wage labor, which may be especially attractive to arts organizations given the proclivity of workers in this sector to be self‐employed. The authors examine the use of flexible versus wage labo…
Nonprofit Organizations and Civil Society in the United States
LeRoux and Feeney’s Nonprofit Organizations and Civil Society in the United States makes a departure from existing nonprofit texts on the market: rather than focus on management, it focuses on nonprofit organizations and their contributions to the social, political, and economic dimensions of society. The book also covers the nexus between nonprofits and civil society. This text offers a theory-oriented undergraduate introduction to the nonprofit…
Impact of the Arts on Individual Contributions to US Civil Society
Many studies have emerged in recent years examining the impact of the arts on educational outcomes, physical and mental health outcomes, local economies, and community well-being. Yet considerably less attention has been given to the impact that participation in the arts has on social behaviour that promotes a civil society. This study seeks to remedy this gap in the literature by examining the effect that both audience-based arts participation a…
Informal Accountability in Multisector Service Delivery Collaborations
Multiagency collaboration is widely used in contemporary service delivery systems. This article explores the interpersonal interactions within collaborative systems, among subsystems, and among organizations. Our focus is on illuminating the informal mechanisms that facilitate collaboration, joint production, coordination and integration of service delivery, and sustained effort. Such interactions generate unofficial expectations, discretionary b…
How Information Matters
Managerial Networking in Nonprofit Organizations
Public management scholars are interested in the ways that public managers can improve the performance of their organizations and, by extension, public service outcomes. However, public sector outcomes are increasingly being produced by nonprofit organizations. Nonprofits have encountered increased pressures to improve effectiveness in recent years, both from their funding entities and from the public. A growing body of public management research…
A Preliminary Theory of Informal Accountability among Network Organizational Actors
Widespread government contracting for nonprofit social service delivery has resulted in extensive reliance on networks of service providers, which involve complicated accountability dynamics. The literature has tended to emphasize formal aspects of accountability in contract relationships, focusing on the specification of contract terms, performance measures, reporting relationships, and stipulated consequences. Far less attention has been focuse…
Who Benefits from Nonprofit Economic Development? Examining the Revenue Distribution of Tax-Exempt Development Organizations among U.S. Cities
Questions surrounding the distribution of benefits have served as the focus for much research on local economic development. While nonprofit community development corporations (CDCs) emerged in the 1960s as one means of redistributing economic development benefits by targeting job training and business growth programs toward the urban poor, CDCs now represent only a portion of all nonprofit economic development organizations (NEDOs) in the United…
City Managers, Career Incentives, and Municipal Service Decisions
City managers play an influential role in brokering intergovernmental service arrangements on behalf of their jurisdiction, yet their motivations for doing so are not well understood. One argument, drawn from theories of bureaucratic entrepreneurship and ambition theory, suggests that cities with managers who are motivated to advance their careers will parlay more interlocal service delivery as means of capturing economic efficiencies. Such strat…
Examining Implementation of the National Voter Registration Act by Nonprofit Organizations
The 1993 National Voter Registration Act authorizes nonprofit social service organizations to conduct nonpartisan voter registration drives, with the aim of making the process more accessible for low‐income citizens and segments of the population historically underrepresented in the political process. Although more than 15 years have elapsed since this important reform was enacted, very little is known about the extent to which nonprofits have em…
Performance Regimes Amidst Governance Complexity
Much of the appeal of performance measurement is explained by its image as a simple and value-neutral way to monitor and improve government. But contemporary governance is characterized by complexity. Few public officials have the luxury of directly providing relatively simple services, the context in which performance regimes work best. Instead, they must work in the context of a disarticulated state, with policy problems that cross national bou…
Networks in Public Administration Scholarship
This article examines the road that network scholarship has followed in Public Administration. We look at the historical drivers of the use of networks in practice and scholarship in the field and discuss how that has shaped the current literature. The body of the article focuses on the current challenges that network scholars face in the discipline, specifically basic theoretical issues, knowledge about formal networks, knowledge about informal …
Prospects for Centralizing Services in an Urban County
Networks of interlocal agreements (ILAs) provide a way for municipal governments in a fragmented region to cooperate on services, and these networks may be especially likely to form when local government officials are linked through interpersonal networks. Drawing on insights from Williams’ Lifestyle Model of Metropolitan Politics and Frederickson’s theory of administrative conjunctions, this paper uses network analytic methods to examine the str…
Interlocal Service Cooperation in U.S. Cities
Local governments increasingly confront policy problems that span the boundaries of individual political jurisdictions. Institutional theories of local governance and intergovernmental relations emphasize the importance of networks for fostering service cooperation among local governments. Yet empirical research fails to examine systematically the effects of social networks on interlocal service cooperation. Do the individual networks of local go…
Legislators and Administrators
State legislators' relationships with administrators have received scant attention in the literature despite the importance of these relationships for delivery of public services. We explored whether or not the legislator‐administrator relationship in one professional state legislature resembles Congress's oversight of federal agencies. We also assessed whether or not term limits changed this relationship. Our findings indicate that monitoring st…
Political Advocacy By Nonprofit Organizations
Nonprofit organizations serve as a voice for their constituent publics in the political arena, even though advocacy practices remain outside their core mission. Some nonprofits embrace their advocacy roles and engage in these activities frequently, while others choose to avoid these activities altogether. What organizational capacities enable nonprofits to pursue an advocacy agenda? Drawing on theoretical perspectives in organizational behavior, …
Managing Stakeholder Demands
Nonprofit social service organizations face unique challenges in attending to the needs of their various stakeholders. This article uses data from a sample of nonprofit organizations in Michigan to examine how well nonprofits manage multiple stakeholder demands. Findings indicate that nonprofits generally balance organizational time and attention to the needs of both clients and funding agencies. However, a small percentage of nonprofits devote d…
Networks in Public Administration Scholarship
This article examines the road that network scholarship has followed in Public Administration. We look at the historical drivers of the use of networks in practice and scholarship in the field and discuss how that has shaped the current literature. The body of the article focuses on the current challenges that network scholars face in the discipline, specifically basic theoretical issues, knowledge about formal networks, knowledge about informal …
Institutional Ties, Transaction Costs, and External Service Production
Analyses of local government contracting increasingly focus on understanding how the transaction costs created by service attributes limit opportunities for external service production. However, the institutional collective action framework suggests that networks among local government actors help to offset these costs for intergovernmental contracting decisions. We use data describing service production arrangements of cities in Michigan to exam…
Performance Regimes Amidst Governance Complexity
Much of the appeal of performance measurement is explained by its image as a simple and value-neutral way to monitor and improve government. But contemporary governance is characterized by complexity. Few public officials have the luxury of directly providing relatively simple services, the context in which performance regimes work best. Instead, they must work in the context of a disarticulated state, with policy problems that cross national bou…
Nonprofits as Civic Intermediaries
Nonprofit organizations have a long-standing tradition of advocacy on behalf of their clients, particularly those that comprise underrepresented groups. However, much less is known about the roles these institutions play in empowering citizens to become active participants in the political process. This research note examines the efforts of nonprofit organizations to facilitate voting and contacting of public officials by their clientele. Results…
Informal Accountability in Multisector Service Delivery Collaborations
Multiagency collaboration is widely used in contemporary service delivery systems. This article explores the interpersonal interactions within collaborative systems, among subsystems, and among organizations. Our focus is on illuminating the informal mechanisms that facilitate collaboration, joint production, coordination and integration of service delivery, and sustained effort. Such interactions generate unofficial expectations, discretionary b…
Explaining Local Government Cooperation on Public Works
In recent years, analysts have begun to study cooperation on public services among local governments. These studies often have concluded that services with scale economies are likely candidates for shared service delivery. This article contributes to the emerging literature on this topic by examining interlocal service arrangements for 10 public works services in Michigan. Despite the fact that public works exhibit substantial scale economies, ma…
Prospects for Centralizing Services in an Urban County
Networks of interlocal agreements (ILAs) provide a way for municipal governments in a fragmented region to cooperate on services, and these networks may be especially likely to form when local government officials are linked through interpersonal networks. Drawing on insights from Williams’ Lifestyle Model of Metropolitan Politics and Frederickson’s theory of administrative conjunctions, this paper uses network analytic methods to examine the str…
What Drives Nonprofit Entrepreneurship
Using survey data from a small sample of nonprofit agencies in the Detroit metropolitan area, this article examines the rate at which nonprofits adopt earned income strategies. For the purpose of this analysis, efforts to generate earned income are described as “entrepreneurial” and measured through product sales, enterprise development, and assessing fees for services. A number of factors are thought to influence the adoption of these activities…
Examining Implementation of the National Voter Registration Act by Nonprofit Organizations
The 1993 National Voter Registration Act authorizes nonprofit social service organizations to conduct nonpartisan voter registration drives, with the aim of making the process more accessible for low‐income citizens and segments of the population historically underrepresented in the political process. Although more than 15 years have elapsed since this important reform was enacted, very little is known about the extent to which nonprofits have em…
Managing Stakeholder Demands
Nonprofit social service organizations face unique challenges in attending to the needs of their various stakeholders. This article uses data from a sample of nonprofit organizations in Michigan to examine how well nonprofits manage multiple stakeholder demands. Findings indicate that nonprofits generally balance organizational time and attention to the needs of both clients and funding agencies. However, a small percentage of nonprofits devote d…
Entrepreneurship among Nonprofit Arts Organizations
Nonprofit entrepreneurship is largely viewed through the lens of commercialization, overshadowing other ways that entrepreneurship manifests within the sector. One such way involves nonprofits ' tendency to meet workforce needs by substituting flexible for wage labor, which may be especially attractive to arts organizations given the proclivity of workers in this sector to be self‐employed. The authors examine the use of flexible versus wage labo…
Legislators and Administrators
State legislators' relationships with administrators have received scant attention in the literature despite the importance of these relationships for delivery of public services. We explored whether or not the legislator‐administrator relationship in one professional state legislature resembles Congress's oversight of federal agencies. We also assessed whether or not term limits changed this relationship. Our findings indicate that monitoring st…
Impact of the Arts on Individual Contributions to US Civil Society
Many studies have emerged in recent years examining the impact of the arts on educational outcomes, physical and mental health outcomes, local economies, and community well-being. Yet considerably less attention has been given to the impact that participation in the arts has on social behaviour that promotes a civil society. This study seeks to remedy this gap in the literature by examining the effect that both audience-based arts participation a…
Assessing e-government capacity to increase voter participation
Who Benefits from Nonprofit Economic Development? Examining the Revenue Distribution of Tax-Exempt Development Organizations among U.S. Cities
Questions surrounding the distribution of benefits have served as the focus for much research on local economic development. While nonprofit community development corporations (CDCs) emerged in the 1960s as one means of redistributing economic development benefits by targeting job training and business growth programs toward the urban poor, CDCs now represent only a portion of all nonprofit economic development organizations (NEDOs) in the United…
Extending the Interdependence Theory to Local Public Service Provision
Lester Salamon’s interdependence theory has held up over time and across dozens of national contexts. However, the theory has largely been developed through data on government partnerships with nonprofits for providing social services. While government-nonprofit partnerships exist in various service areas and policy contexts, the theory has rarely been applied in less “traditional” service settings. We apply a mixed-method sequential research des…
What Drives Nonprofit Entrepreneurship
Using survey data from a small sample of nonprofit agencies in the Detroit metropolitan area, this article examines the rate at which nonprofits adopt earned income strategies. For the purpose of this analysis, efforts to generate earned income are described as “entrepreneurial” and measured through product sales, enterprise development, and assessing fees for services. A number of factors are thought to influence the adoption of these activities…
Explaining Local Government Cooperation on Public Works
In recent years, analysts have begun to study cooperation on public services among local governments. These studies often have concluded that services with scale economies are likely candidates for shared service delivery. This article contributes to the emerging literature on this topic by examining interlocal service arrangements for 10 public works services in Michigan. Despite the fact that public works exhibit substantial scale economies, ma…
Nonprofits as Civic Intermediaries
Nonprofit organizations have a long-standing tradition of advocacy on behalf of their clients, particularly those that comprise underrepresented groups. However, much less is known about the roles these institutions play in empowering citizens to become active participants in the political process. This research note examines the efforts of nonprofit organizations to facilitate voting and contacting of public officials by their clientele. Results…
Political Advocacy By Nonprofit Organizations
Nonprofit organizations serve as a voice for their constituent publics in the political arena, even though advocacy practices remain outside their core mission. Some nonprofits embrace their advocacy roles and engage in these activities frequently, while others choose to avoid these activities altogether. What organizational capacities enable nonprofits to pursue an advocacy agenda? Drawing on theoretical perspectives in organizational behavior, …
Managing Stakeholder Demands
Nonprofit social service organizations face unique challenges in attending to the needs of their various stakeholders. This article uses data from a sample of nonprofit organizations in Michigan to examine how well nonprofits manage multiple stakeholder demands. Findings indicate that nonprofits generally balance organizational time and attention to the needs of both clients and funding agencies. However, a small percentage of nonprofits devote d…
Institutional Ties, Transaction Costs, and External Service Production
Analyses of local government contracting increasingly focus on understanding how the transaction costs created by service attributes limit opportunities for external service production. However, the institutional collective action framework suggests that networks among local government actors help to offset these costs for intergovernmental contracting decisions. We use data describing service production arrangements of cities in Michigan to exam…
Paternalistic or Participatory Governance? Examining Opportunities for Client Participation in Nonprofit Social Service Organizations
Nonprofits represent a substantial group of third‐party agents that deliver public services, yet little is known about the extent to which these organizations embrace participatory governance practices. Using survey data from nonprofit social service agencies in Michigan, the author examines how these organizations provide opportunities for client participation and identifies factors that contribute to these practices. Four methods of securing cl…
Prospects for Centralizing Services in an Urban County
Networks of interlocal agreements (ILAs) provide a way for municipal governments in a fragmented region to cooperate on services, and these networks may be especially likely to form when local government officials are linked through interpersonal networks. Drawing on insights from Williams’ Lifestyle Model of Metropolitan Politics and Frederickson’s theory of administrative conjunctions, this paper uses network analytic methods to examine the str…
Interlocal Service Cooperation in U.S. Cities
Local governments increasingly confront policy problems that span the boundaries of individual political jurisdictions. Institutional theories of local governance and intergovernmental relations emphasize the importance of networks for fostering service cooperation among local governments. Yet empirical research fails to examine systematically the effects of social networks on interlocal service cooperation. Do the individual networks of local go…
Legislators and Administrators
State legislators' relationships with administrators have received scant attention in the literature despite the importance of these relationships for delivery of public services. We explored whether or not the legislator‐administrator relationship in one professional state legislature resembles Congress's oversight of federal agencies. We also assessed whether or not term limits changed this relationship. Our findings indicate that monitoring st…
Who Benefits from Nonprofit Economic Development? Examining the Revenue Distribution of Tax-Exempt Development Organizations among U.S. Cities
Questions surrounding the distribution of benefits have served as the focus for much research on local economic development. While nonprofit community development corporations (CDCs) emerged in the 1960s as one means of redistributing economic development benefits by targeting job training and business growth programs toward the urban poor, CDCs now represent only a portion of all nonprofit economic development organizations (NEDOs) in the United…
City Managers, Career Incentives, and Municipal Service Decisions
City managers play an influential role in brokering intergovernmental service arrangements on behalf of their jurisdiction, yet their motivations for doing so are not well understood. One argument, drawn from theories of bureaucratic entrepreneurship and ambition theory, suggests that cities with managers who are motivated to advance their careers will parlay more interlocal service delivery as means of capturing economic efficiencies. Such strat…
Examining Implementation of the National Voter Registration Act by Nonprofit Organizations
The 1993 National Voter Registration Act authorizes nonprofit social service organizations to conduct nonpartisan voter registration drives, with the aim of making the process more accessible for low‐income citizens and segments of the population historically underrepresented in the political process. Although more than 15 years have elapsed since this important reform was enacted, very little is known about the extent to which nonprofits have em…
Performance Regimes Amidst Governance Complexity
Much of the appeal of performance measurement is explained by its image as a simple and value-neutral way to monitor and improve government. But contemporary governance is characterized by complexity. Few public officials have the luxury of directly providing relatively simple services, the context in which performance regimes work best. Instead, they must work in the context of a disarticulated state, with policy problems that cross national bou…
Networks in Public Administration Scholarship
This article examines the road that network scholarship has followed in Public Administration. We look at the historical drivers of the use of networks in practice and scholarship in the field and discuss how that has shaped the current literature. The body of the article focuses on the current challenges that network scholars face in the discipline, specifically basic theoretical issues, knowledge about formal networks, knowledge about informal …
How Information Matters
Managerial Networking in Nonprofit Organizations
Public management scholars are interested in the ways that public managers can improve the performance of their organizations and, by extension, public service outcomes. However, public sector outcomes are increasingly being produced by nonprofit organizations. Nonprofits have encountered increased pressures to improve effectiveness in recent years, both from their funding entities and from the public. A growing body of public management research…
A Preliminary Theory of Informal Accountability among Network Organizational Actors
Widespread government contracting for nonprofit social service delivery has resulted in extensive reliance on networks of service providers, which involve complicated accountability dynamics. The literature has tended to emphasize formal aspects of accountability in contract relationships, focusing on the specification of contract terms, performance measures, reporting relationships, and stipulated consequences. Far less attention has been focuse…
Nonprofit Organizations and Civil Society in the United States
LeRoux and Feeney’s Nonprofit Organizations and Civil Society in the United States makes a departure from existing nonprofit texts on the market: rather than focus on management, it focuses on nonprofit organizations and their contributions to the social, political, and economic dimensions of society. The book also covers the nexus between nonprofits and civil society. This text offers a theory-oriented undergraduate introduction to the nonprofit…
Impact of the Arts on Individual Contributions to US Civil Society
Many studies have emerged in recent years examining the impact of the arts on educational outcomes, physical and mental health outcomes, local economies, and community well-being. Yet considerably less attention has been given to the impact that participation in the arts has on social behaviour that promotes a civil society. This study seeks to remedy this gap in the literature by examining the effect that both audience-based arts participation a…
Informal Accountability in Multisector Service Delivery Collaborations
Multiagency collaboration is widely used in contemporary service delivery systems. This article explores the interpersonal interactions within collaborative systems, among subsystems, and among organizations. Our focus is on illuminating the informal mechanisms that facilitate collaboration, joint production, coordination and integration of service delivery, and sustained effort. Such interactions generate unofficial expectations, discretionary b…
Personality traits as predictors of citizen engagement with local government
Do citizens' personality traits affect their likelihood of interacting with local public officials? Using psychology's preferred approach for operationalizing personality — the "Big Five" trait framework — and two nationally-representative survey data sets from the U.S., we examine this question, and find that: (1) citizens who score higher on openness and extraversion traits have an increased likelihood of attending a local government board meet…
Entrepreneurship among Nonprofit Arts Organizations
Nonprofit entrepreneurship is largely viewed through the lens of commercialization, overshadowing other ways that entrepreneurship manifests within the sector. One such way involves nonprofits ' tendency to meet workforce needs by substituting flexible for wage labor, which may be especially attractive to arts organizations given the proclivity of workers in this sector to be self‐employed. The authors examine the use of flexible versus wage labo…
Assessing e-government capacity to increase voter participation
Exploring nonprofit dilemmas through a new lens
Experimental studies have just begun to diffuse slowly in nonprofit research, reflecting the general recognition that experimental studies can help nonprofit researchers overcome some limitations of the methods that have traditionally been used. This special issue includes four papers that consider the diversity of experimental research in nonprofit studies. First, a systematic literature review of experimental studies in fundraising provides a n…
Political science (24 works) · Business (20 works) · Nonprofit Sector and Volunteering (20 works) · Public relations (19 works) · Public Policy and Administration Research (16 works) · Public Administration (15 works) · Marketing (13 works) · Politics (13 works) · Public Administration (13 works) · Government (linguistics (12 works)