Survey Pre-Registration for a Project on Faith-Based Organizations’ Denominational Affiliation and Sector Bias

The provision of public services through nonprofit-government partnerships is a prominent strategy employed throughout the world and is well noted among practitioners and scholars alike. A growing sector bias literature also indicates that citizens maintain different perceptions of the performance of these organizational types (Hvidman and Andersen 2016; Hvidman 2019; Marvel 2015; Meier et al. 2022; Meier and An 2020; 2021). That literature, however, has paid little attention to the differences in the perceptions of performance between secular and religious nonprofits and has especially ignored how these differences compare to the perceptions of public organizational performance. This survey seeks to determine the nature of sector bias across a common nonprofit organizational characteristic—religiosity—and its relationship with two dimensions of performance (effectiveness and equity) and the willingness to donate and volunteer. The experiment is a 5 x 2 x 2 factor between subjects’ design using a hypothetical elementary school operating as either a public school or one of four types of denomination-based nonprofit charter schools. 1,260 Prolific respondents will be used, as determined by power analysis appended to the end of this pre-registration. The American University IRB has approved the experiment. All respondents will be told that the statewide average for schools is an overall pass rate of 80% and a low-income pass rate of 70%. The experiment will be fielded on ¬¬¬¬June 30, 2025.