Who Participates Where? VSO Participation in the Advanced Industrial Democracies

• In Event: Gateways to Political Mobilization

Abstract

While widely recognized that voluntary sector organizations (VSOs) exert a marked impact on our daily lives by providing goods and services, they also strengthen civil society. Public participation in VSOs has global implications for communities ranging from education and the environment to health and welfare, and the implications of VSO participation and other types of civic engagement are frequently intertwined with explicitly political dimensions. For instance, Putnam’s Bowling Alone (2000) as well as scores of subsequent publications underscore the importance of civic participation for a polity’s democratic health. A number of articles have specifically focused on political membership and participation. And scholars have published comparative examinations of civic and voluntary sector participation in leading political science journals. Others have highlighted the intrinsic connection between politics and volunteering.

We also contend that many dimensions of voluntary sector participation are inherently political. While certain types of these activities—-such as being a member of a professional association or volunteering for a sports organization—may appear less intrinsically political than others, there is no doubt that many voluntary sector activities—-such as participating at humanitarian associations, labor unions, environmental organizations, or political parties—are often fundamentally political. These activities may even express political attitudes with greater salience than public opinion surveys or comparable vehicles for assessing citizens’ political perspectives.

Previous scholarship has advanced our understanding of the relationships between volunteers’ socio-demographic characteristics and VSO involvement, and it is widely recognized that individual socio-economic characteristics influence the propensity to perform voluntary work. Despite this strong theoretical foundation, previous research often examines participation measured by an outcome such as whether or to what extent an individual does or does not participate. Such an approach may not effectively account for critical variation that arises across different types of VSOs.

We extend this literature by leveraging four waves of European and World Values Survey (EVS-WVS) data across the advanced industrial democracies to examine critical factors associated with individuals’ participation choices across nine different VSO types, including political parties. Our analysis employs a modified multinomial logistic regression model that has been extended to allow for the inclusion of multiple positive response options across each of the nine VSO institutional types where survey respondents may indicate that they volunteer rather than requiring a singular discrete positive response option as is typical with multinomial logistic regression models. We incorporate a variety of critical micro- and macro-level factors previously identified in the VSO scholarship to demonstrate not only that these factors are important for voluntary sector participation, but also that the impacts of these factors vary substantially across both different VSO institutions as well as participation types, including both active and inactive participation. We find substantial variation in patterns of both active and inactive participation for different types of VSOs. For example, gender has a substantial impact on who participates where. For example, women are more likely to participate in humanitarian, educational, environmental, and religious VSOs. Whereas men are more likely to participate in labor unions, political parties, and professional and sports associations. Age, education, income, and macro-level cross-national factors are also important determinants for which the impacts vary substantially across different VSO types. For instance, individuals from countries with higher levels of economic inequality are more likely to volunteer for political parties as well as some other VSOs types, but not others. Overall, our analyses demonstrate that examining different locations of participation has significant implications for the key factors associated with individuals’ participation choices.

Authors

• Anthony Sealey, University of Pennsylvania

• Femida Handy, University of Pennsylvania