Abstract
This paper investigates how the 2008–9 recession affected civic participation in disadvantaged and affluent neighbourhoods in the city of Rotterdam. We hypothesize that levels of civic participation may either diverge or converge across neighbourhoods with a different socioeconomic status. We build upon a recent wave of studies examining how civil society has been affected by the 2008–9 recession. Using five waves from the Rotterdam Neighbourhood Profile survey (N = 63,134; 71 neighbourhoods), we find converging trends in civic participation. Between 2008 and 2013, civic participation declined in affluent neighbourhoods but increased slightly in disadvantaged neighbourhoods. This convergence is partly due to the level of perceived problems in the neighbourhood and differences in the types of volunteering found in disadvantaged and affluent neighbourhoods. In addition, we argue that these converging trends can be better understood by considering the neighbourhood organizational infrastructure and local policy configurations. Next to examining the impact of the 2008–9 recession on civic participation, we contribute to research on civil society by comparing the UK and Dutch context.
Highlights
How people and communities respond to economic hard times has long been of interest to sociologists (e.g. Bourdieu et al 1999; Jahoda, Lazarsfeld and Zeisel 2017 [1971]; Putnam 2000; Wilson 1996)
In contrast to Lim and Laurence (2015), we find that rates of volunteering and neighbourhood involvement in different neighbourhoods in Rotterdam generally converged between 2008 and 2013
We examine whether civic participation varies across neighbourhoods and time
Summary
How people and communities respond to economic hard times has long been of interest to sociologists (e.g. Bourdieu et al 1999; Jahoda, Lazarsfeld and Zeisel 2017 [1971]; Putnam 2000; Wilson 1996). Given that local communities bear increased responsibility for continuing their civic organizations, these findings strengthen the expectation that organizations in affluent communities with strong social networks are more capable of dealing with the challenges of the 2008–9 recession, whereas organizations in deprived communities with weak social networks were less capable of handling the cutback in resources (cf Lindsey 2013) These discrepancies disproportionally affect levels of citizen participation, because organizations form the base of participation; they provide the opportunities for people to volunteer or to become involved in neighbourhood issues (Sampson 2012; Small 2009). For all neighbourhood variables the contextual data were taken from the same year as the year of the Neighbourhood Profile survey
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