National Context, Religiosity, and Volunteering: Results from 53 Countries

Abstract

and Zimbabwe. 13 Expected probabilities of volunteering are calculated for married men with average age (42.7 years) and average educational level (5.4).14 Note that originally the church attendance variable was ordinal. So, be careful when interpreting the effect of a single day increase. We checked whether the positive effect of church attendance is less strong at the higher end of the scale. Indeed, we found evi-Delivered by Ingenta to :

Time vs. money — The supply of voluntary labor and charitable donations across Europe

“…Immigrants have a significantly lower probability of working for the charity, which is in accord with the existing literature on social integration, showing that immigrants are at a higher risk of being socially excluded with respect to social and political participation in general (see, e.g., Tsakloglou and Papadopoulos, 2002). Conforming existing research on the relationship between religiosity and volunteering (see, e.g., Curtis et al, 2001;Ruiter and de Graaf, 2006), which suggests that church members are more likely to be involved in voluntary organizations than non-members, individuals belonging to a religious denomination show a higher probability of working voluntarily and spending money. Since religious organizations are among the dominant voluntary organizations in most European societies (Gaskin and Smith, 1995), this does not mean that religious involvement boosts volunteering in general.…”

“…Church membership is found to not only increase an individual's involvement in religious organizations, but is positively correlated with participation in secular organizations as well. Ruiter and de Graaf (2006) explain this "spillover effect" by the fact that people who are already involved in religious volunteering are more likely to communicate with people who volunteer for non-religious organizations. Hence, corresponding to network theory, their chance to volunteer for secular organizations should be high as well.…”

Churches: Lasting Sources of Civic Engagement? Effects of Secularization and Educational Expansion on Non-religious Volunteering in the Netherlands, 1988 and 2006

“…Still, it is conceivable that churchgoers in secular societies, because they are part of more cohesive communities, will experience more peer pressure to volunteer in religious organizations, which again increases the odds that their religious voluntary actions spillover into non-religious volunteering. For the Netherlands, De Hart (2014) recently showed that there is indeed a strong spillover effect from religious into nonreligious volunteering, while Ruiter and De Graaf (2006), conducting a crossnational study into religion and volunteering, demonstrated that in secular societies religious people are more active in both religious and non-religious volunteering. This line of reasoning results in our first hypothesis: Over time the proportion of regular churchgoers who volunteer for non-religious organizations has increased in the Netherlands (H1).…”

“…In the Netherlands, this was shown by Bekkers and Schuyt (2008) and Van Tienen et al (2011). Why collective aspects of religion are particularly important in this respect is usually explained in terms of network theory (Bekkers 2004;Ruiter and De Graaf 2006). What matters is that religion brings people together in close-knit social networks in which engagement in voluntary work is a social norm to which religious people are supposed to conform.…”

“…In several countries, religious involvement has been identified as an important determinant of volunteering for both religious as well as non-religious voluntary associations. This is for instance the case in the US (Jackson et al 1995;Putnam 2000;Putnam and Campbell 2010), in Canada (Berger 2006;Perks and Haan 2011) as well as in various European countries (Reitsma 2007;Ruiter and De Graaf 2006;Savelkoul et al 2011). In the Netherlands, the association between religious involvement and volunteering is also found (De Hart 1999), and according to Van Ingen and Dekker (2011), it has even become stronger between 1975 and 2005. However, in the Netherlands, there is something odd to this relationship between religious involvement and volunteering.…”