Volunteering in Cross-National Perspective: Evidence From 24 Countries by Lester M. Salamon

This is one in a series of working papers produced under the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project (CNP), a collaborative effort by scholars around the world to understand the scope, structure, and role of the nonprofit sector using a common framework and approach. Begun in 1989 in 13 countries, the Project continues to expand, currently encompassing about 40 countries.

This paper takes a hard-nosed look at voluntary social participation in a cross-national perspective. Drawing on data gathered by the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project (CNP), it dispels the popular myth of declining civic participation in the advanced democracies. It demonstrates that volunteering is augmented rather than inhibited by a formal organizational base, which in turn grows as a result of state support. What is more, it shows how the social roles and functions of volunteering have been affected by social forces that have shaped the nonprofit sector throughout the 20th century: social class relations during industrialization, government social policies, and organized religion. The conclusions that emerge from this analysis strongly suggest that volunteering, and more generally civic participation and self-organization of individuals to pursue common interests, are not acts of “spontaneous combustion” or “immaculate conception,” but instruments and outcomes of social policies that are highly dependent on each country’s institutional path of development. To explore these points, the discussion here falls into two major sections. First, we describe the project from which the data presented here are drawn and outline the major findings Salamon and Sokolowski Volunteering in Cross-National Perspective of this work with regard to the scope and structure of volunteering. Against this backdrop, we then assess a number of alternative explanations for the patterns that we discover, looking first at possible explanations of the scale of volunteering and then at possible explanations of its varying structure from place to place. A concluding section then pulls these strands of analysis together and assesses their implications for our broader understanding of volunteering internationally.

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