This project studies organizational population dynamics in the civil sector, specifically of self-help/mutual aid organizations between 1955 and 2000. Population ecology models of the birth and death rates of organizations have been applied relatively successfully to the private and governmental sectors, but controversies exist over the measurement of the key variables of legitimacy and competition. The civic sector provides a strategic opportunity to redefine legitimacy in terms of reputational externalities and competition in terms of resource differentiation. The project gathers data on the emergence, growth, decline and persistent of self-help/mutual aid organizations from encyclopedia, sourcebooks, and IRS records, and links this information to demographic, financial, and affiliation characteristics of the organizations. In addition, it draws reputational data on the organizations from journals and federal registers of grant awards. Dynamic modeling using event history methods, negative binomial and poisson regression, and latent curve techniques are applied to the data. The results show the extent of the influence of legitimacy and competition on organization survival in the non-profit sector.
