Who Participates Where?

Abstract Participation in voluntary sector organizations (VSOs) has major implications for civil society. Extant research identifies key linkages between socio-demographic factors and VSO participation. The authors extend this literature by leveraging four waves of survey data to examine how critical factors associate with individuals’ participation choices in nine different VSO types across the advanced industrial democracies and find substantial variation in patterns of participation. For example, gender has a substantial impact. 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. Other factors, such as age, education, income, and macro-level cross-national factors are also important determinants of who volunteers where. The authors consider two forms of participation – active and inactive participation – which they conceptualize as being on a continuum of intensity of participation and for which voluntary sector participants often share similar choices. Data Source Acknowledgment The principal dataset we use for our analysis is a derived product based on publicly available data from the European Values Study (EVS) and the World Values Survey (WVS). The original data were collected and distributed by the European Values Study Foundation and the World Values Survey Association. We gratefully acknowledge their work in producing and maintaining these valuable resources. The dataset provided here has undergone cleaning, recoding, and integration by the authors for the purposes of the associated research project. All transformations, variable constructions, and coding decisions were performed independently by the authors. The EVS Foundation and the WVS Association bear no responsibility for the analyses, interpretations, or conclusions presented in this project. Users wishing to access the original, unmodified data should consult the official EVS and WVS repositories.