Explaining the Varieties of Volunteering in Europe: A Capability Approach

Bernard Enjolras

doi:10.1007/s11266-021-00347-5

Abstract

Volunteer rates vary greatly across Europe despite the voluntary sector’s common history and tradition. This contribution advances a theoretical explanation for the variation in volunteering across Europe—the capability approach—and tests this approach by adopting a two-step strategy for modeling contextual effects. This approach, referring to the concept of capability introduced by Sen (Choice, welfare and measurement, Oxford University Press, 1980/1982), is based on the claim that the demand and supply sides of the voluntary sector can be expected to vary according to collective and individual capabilities to engage in volunteering. To empirically test the approach, the study relied on two data sources—the 2015 European Union (EU) Survey on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), including an ad hoc module on volunteering at the individual level, and the Quality of Government Institute and PEW Research Center macro-level data sets—to operationalize economic, human, political, social, and religious contextual factors and assess their effects on individuals’ capability to volunteer. The results support the capability hypothesis at both levels. At the individual level, indicators of human, economic, and social resources have a positive effect on the likelihood of volunteering. At the contextual level, macro-structural indicators of economic, political, social, and religious contexts affect individuals’ ability to transform resources into functioning—that is, volunteering.

Highlights

Despite sharing common philanthropic traditions and institutions, contemporary European countries display profound differences in their volunteer rates—that is, the share of a country’s population involved in volunteering
A logistic regression model at the individual level of analysis was estimated for each country with the dichotomous variable of participation in formal volunteering as the dependent variable and the following independent variables: marital status, education, gender, health, economic status, weekly hours worked, household disposable income, age, number of children living in the household, participation, and frequency of contact with friends
The objective of this study was to propose and test a theoretical understanding of cross-country differences in formal volunteering in Europe based on the capability approach

Summary

Introduction

Despite sharing common philanthropic traditions and institutions, contemporary European countries display profound differences in their volunteer rates—that is, the share of a country’s population involved in volunteering. The continent today appears quite heterogeneous and diversified regarding the share of the population volunteering in a formal setting. Formal volunteering in Europe—measured according to the International Labour Organization (ILO, 2011) definition that emphasizes its organizational, unpaid, non-compulsory, and outside the family and kin characteristics—ranges from high rates in Nordic countries (50–30% of the population volunteers) to low rates in Southern post-Communist countries (8–3% of the population volunteers). How can such variations in volunteer rates be explained?

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Conclusion