A Shadow State? Voluntarism in Metropolitan Los Angeles

The character of voluntary action and its relationship to the political economy are changing in response to recent policy shifts favoring service reductions, privatization, and a transferral of responsibility for services, under ‘new federalism’ policies. In an examination of new data for voluntary organizations in the Los Angeles metropolitan region, an extensively differentiated sector of significant size is found that is often highly reliant on public funding, but which is becoming increasingly entrepreneurial and has begun to shift more of the service cost burden onto clients as a consequence of reductions in funding support. These characteristics have important implications for the region and possibly for other urban areas in the USA, one of which is that this new reliance on voluntary services could lead to the existence of a shadow state: a new institutional form that fulfills many of the functions of government but also makes many public policy decisions in the absence of governmental preemption.