GLOBAL SOCIETY Mega Donors’ Perspectives on Philanthropy and Government Relations in Israel Baruch Shimoni 1 Published online: 2 May 2017 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2017 Abstract Philanthropists’ involvement in the development and implementation of social policies is a growing yet understudied phenomena. Captured in the model of alternative politics, in which self-provision of public services emerges when citizens face the failure of private and public mecha- nisms, not only in terms of obtaining sufficiently high- quality services, but also in terms of utilizing political chan- nels to influence public policy, and poses major challenges to the political system. This dynamic of welfare states in recent decades is contested, since while it provides new streams of funding and innovative and professional capacities, it also has potential negative repercussions to democratic processes, eq- uity and universalism of social policies. In-depth interviews with fourteen Israeli mega donors are used to show how mega donors promote relations between philanthropy and govern- ment in Israel that are based on voluntary cooptation in which the government regulates the philanthropic activity in Israel. By voluntarily granting the government a mandate to regulate philanthropic activity, the mega donors lead philanthropy into a situation in which philanthropy’ s autonomy may be jeopar- dized and its agendas may be subordinated to the priorities, preferences and business-minded worldview of the ruling elite - the political elite (government) and the business elites (mega donors). Keywords Self-cooptation . Mega donors . Philanthropy . Government Philanthropy has been rapidly growing in the past decades around the world and especially in western countries. Research relates this growth to two simultaneous processes. The first process is the decline of the welfare state and of social support services (Doron 2002; Gal 2002; Salamon 1993); the second process is the flourishing of neo-liberal political and economic ideas that support free enterprise and competition (Brown 2003). The influence of these two pro- cesses is felt in Israel (Shalev 1999), as in other places around the world (Harvey 2005), by the decrease of the middle class and an increase in the gap between rich and poor, between a small group of affluent people and the group that lacks basic economic resources. The proliferation of the latter group’ s difficulties and needs has led to a rapid growth of the Israeli third sector (non-profit), and within it, the active involvement of very successful businesspeople (Bmega donors^) who use their financial and managerial knowledge and practices to de- velop and run philanthropic projects (Schmid and Rudich- Cohn 2012; Shamir 2007; Shimoni 2008; Silber 2007). This essay examines a scarcely studied dynamic of welfare states, namely the involvement of Mega Donors in the devel- opment and provision of social services, and the effects that these processes can have on social policies and priorities and on the autonomy and accountability of the different actors in welfare arrangements. This dynamic is part of a well- documented process of growing involvement of private parties in the provision of social services and the implemen- tation of social policies, which result in what is called BThe welfare mix^ (Ascoli and Ranci 2002; Powell 2007; Powell and Barrientos 2004). The welfare mix is a result of a transi- tion Bfrom the old passive to a new active politics of the welfare state^ (Powell and Barrientos 2004, p. 87) towards a system in which in place of the state monopoly over the pro- vision of social services, various combinations of government, private and nonprofit organizations engage in social policy * Baruch Shimoni baruch.shimoni@biu.ac.il 1 Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Bar-Ilan University, 52900 Ramat Gan, Israel Soc (2017) 54:261–271 DOI 10.1007/s12115-017-0133-x