Civic Participation and Social Embeddedness: Differences Between Urban and Rural Communities

Abstract

Does civic participation lead to a large social network? This study claims that high levels of civic participation may obstruct individual social embeddedness. Using survey data from the German Survey on Volunteering (Deutscher Freiwilligensurvey; 1999–2009), this study conducts macro- as well as multi-level regressions to examine the link between civic participation and social embeddedness. Findings reveal that civic participation on the sub-national regional level is not generally associated with social embeddedness, but it affects the participants’ and non-participants’ possibilities for friendships differently. This holds especially true in urban areas, but the effect cannot be found in rural areas. The analysis has implications for further research to enhance the social embeddedness of the excluded.

Rural Development in the Digital Age: Exploring Information and Communication Technology through Social Inclusion☆

“…Much of my previous work has focused on the construction of knowledge and exchange of research‐based information in ways that we aspire to be more engaged with community‐level social actors to help inform their development efforts. This field of study, which many RSS members have contributed to, has resulted in numerous methodological strides (Kleiner, Kerstetter, and Green 2012; Stoecker 2012) with the force and scale of what I would call a social movement. What has gone under‐explored are the ways in which ICTs have been used and could be used for engagement, and what are the benefits and challenges to these approaches.…”

Monitoring Civil Society. The German Survey on Volunteering 1999–2019

“…Further, some studies address particular contexts that may affect people differently depending on their involvement in volunteering. Research carried out by Kleiner (2021aKleiner ( , 2021bKleiner ( , 2021c focuses on civic participation and shows that for participants, high macro-level participation on the sub-national regional level is associated with a higher number of friendships and a higher expectation of receiving support. However, it is also associated with fewer friendships and a lower expectation of support for non-participants.…”

Neighborhood Does Matter: Farmers’ Local Social Interactions and Land Rental Behaviors in China

“…Therefore, the core idea of social embeddedness is that the behavior of an economic agent is embedded in a social network, i.e., an individual's economic actions are always unfolding in interaction with others, and his or her decisions are always made in connection with others [20,21]. According to this social embeddedness theory, farmers' behavior is affected by both the "autonomy effect", which is related to individuals and emphasizes the impact of individual-level factors [22], and the "embeddedness effect", which is related to the farmers' social environment [23,24]. As previously mentioned, most of the studies on land transfer and farmland circulation have mainly focused on the autonomy effect while the embeddedness effect has been generally ignored.…”