The Institutional Division of Labor and the Egalitarian Obligations of Nonprofits* Chiara Cordelli Politics, University College London P RIVATIZATION is a widespread phenomenon in contemporary liberal democracies. One facet of privatization is the state delegation of welfare and primary-good-supporting services to private associations. 1 Governments give subsidies to so-called “public charities” to deliver public services such as basic education, healthcare, and childcare. They hire and create incentives for nonprofits and NGOs to perform public functions and to implement social policies. 2 This process is called “privatization,” given the assumption, more normative than factual, that the state has a primary duty to provide their citizens with sufficient public options to access the above services. Privatiza- tion thus refers to the provision of these public goods through private nonprofits. I will investigate whether, in the context of privatization, a normative division of labor between the egalitarian norms that govern the conduct of political institutions and those that govern voluntary associations is tenable. To put it differently, I will assess what happens to the scope of putatively political principles of distributive justice when government responsibilities are discharged through private associations. 3 I will then examine whether a clear institutional division of labor between these associations and political institutions ought to be preserved against the threat that privatization poses to it. For the current *I would like to thank Matthias Freidank, Cécile Laborde, Jonathan Ira Levy, Saladin Meckled-Garcia, Joshua Mendelsohn, and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments. I would also like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. for their generous support. 1 Although in this article I will mainly refer to private nonprofit associations, most of my considerations are equally valid in the case of for-profit enterprises. 2 Here I will focus on the American and British contexts. For an overview of privatization in the US see Steven Rathgeb Simith, “Nonprofits and public administration,” American Review of Public Administration, 40 (2010), 129–52; Steven Rathgeb Simith and Michael Lipsky, Nonprofits for Hire: The Welfare State in the Age of Contracting (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). For the UK see the British Humanist Association, Quality and Equality: Human Rights, Public Services and Religious Organizations (London: BHA, 2007). 3 In the US, this division is well preserved by the “state action” constitutional doctrine. See Martha Minow, “Public and private partnership: accounting for the new religion,” Harvard Law Review, 116 (2003), 1229–70 at p. 1229. The Journal of Political Philosophy © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9760.2010.00388.x