A remedy for unequal participation? How welfare states impact on social and political engagement

Transcription

1 A remedy for unequal participation? How welfare states impact on social and political engagement Dr. Isabelle Stadelmann-Steffen University of Konstanz Paper for presentation at the workshop 5 Professionalization and Individualized Collective Action: Analyzing New Participatory Dimensions in Civil Society, ECPR Joint Sessions, Lisbon 2009 First draft This contribution evaluates the relationship between public welfare provision and individual civic engagement, and in particular whether a state s welfare activities can impact on the social stratification of social and political civic participation. Different to former studies in this field which have been centred on the question of whether welfare state policy crowds in or out civic activities this paper thus focuses on the equality problem of civic engagement. It is assumed that welfare state policy does not uniformly affect voluntary activities of various social groups and therefore impacts on social stratification of civic engagement. Focusing on two forms of civic engagement, namely social and political volunteering, the analyses provide support for this hypothesis: While volunteering of more affluent individuals is lower in extensive welfare states than it is in countries that spend less on welfare services, this does not hold for lower class citizens. Moreover, extensive welfare policy reduces the negative effect of low affluence on social and political volunteering. This eventually means that welfare states have the potential to equalize individual civic participation. 1

2 Introduction This paper investigates the relationship between public welfare provision and individual civic engagement, and in particular whether a state s welfare activities can impact on the social stratification of social and political civic participation. Different to former studies in this field which have been centred on the question of whether welfare state policy crowds in or out civic activities (i.e., Boje and Strandh 2005; Curtis et al. 2001; Dahlberg 2005; Kääriäinen and Lehtonen 2006; Künemund and Rein 1999; Nicolaysen 2001; Ruiter and De Graf 2006; Van Oorschot and Arts 2005), this contribution focuses on the equality problem of civic engagement. There are at least two reasons why it is relevant to care about unequal civic participation (Schlozman et al. 1999). First, participation in voluntary activities is supposed to develop individual capacities. In this view, civic engagement is educational and those that get engaged become more independent, efficacious, and competent, larger in their capacities for thought, greater in their respect for others and their willingness to take responsibility, better able to appraise their own interests and those of the community (Schlozman et al. 1999: 428). Moreover, through civic engagement individuals make social contacts and become parts of a network. It is quite obvious that lower social groups being underrepresented in civic activities will not or to a lesser extent profit from these advantageous effects of civic participation. Unequal civic engagement will therefore eventually increase the gap between different social stratums. Second, civic engagement can also be seen as a means for (equal) protection of interests in public life. Through civic activities mainly in terms of political engagement citizens have the possibility to articulate and aggregate their preferences and to influence policy making. Again, unequal civic engagement implies that more affluent citizens and their interests will be better heard in politics. As long as individuals differ in their preferences and interests, civic participation needs therefore be equal (Schlozman et al. 1999: 429f.). It is here that the article finds its starting point, arguing that by just putting to the test two opposite assumptions (Kääriäinen and Lehtonen 2006: 27) the extant literature on the relationship between welfare state policy and civic engagement misses one crucial issue: it is not only the level of civic engagement that matters and, hence, whether welfare states crowd out or in voluntary activities but also its distribution. The main aim of the present paper is therefore to assess the welfare state effect on the equality of volunteering. In so doing, the proposed paper goes beyond the existing research in two respects. First, unlike former studies this contribution argues that an overall analysis of civic engagement is not appropriate, since it is not sensible to assume that welfare state policy equally affects all 2

3 forms of volunteering. More precisely, while public social services may quite heavily influence civic activities in welfare state related areas, i.e. social action, this relationship can be different in other fields (Day and Devlin 1996: 38). Also, different forms of volunteering offer better or worse conditions for the participation of less affluent individuals. This paper therefore distinguishes between two types of volunteering, namely social and political civic engagement. Second, as the welfare state does not affect the entire population in the same way, it is reasonable to believe that the effect welfare state policy has on voluntary engagement is also not uniform (Scheepers and Te Grotenhuis 2005: 456), but rather its effect varies depending on individual resources, values, and behaviour patterns (Schmid 1984: 281). Most obviously, the upper social stratum is the main contributor to the welfare state, while lower social classes stand to benefit most from welfare state provision. It must therefore be expected that the welfare state context influences various social groups of individuals differently in their propensity to civic engagement and therefore impacts on social stratification of civic engagement. Group-specific welfare state effects will therefore be hypothesized and modelled (see Elster 1998). Conceptually, the study adopts a multilevel approach. This is the most appropriate research design, as activities of civil society are first and foremost individual ones (see Hedström and Swedberg 1996). In examining the relationship between the welfare state and civil society, we are faced with a multilevel phenomenon, for the interaction between the welfare state and individual behavior is of interest. Data from the fourth wave of the World Values Survey (WVS), , form the empirical basis of the contribution, which is complemented by context data for 23 OECD countries. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: first, a short overview on the level and the stratification in civic engagement among the OECD countries will be presented. In the third section the theoretical background on the relationship between the welfare state and civil society will be addressed and the hypotheses regarding inequality of civic engagement will be elaborated on. Next, the methodological proceeding and the operationalisation of the variables will be described. In the fifth paragraph, the empirical results will be presented, and the paper concludes with a summary of the most important findings and conclusions. 3

4 The variety of civic engagement forms and social stratification of volunteering Civic engagement as it is used in this paper refers to activities outside the own household in which time is given freely to benefit another person, group, or organization (Wilson 2000: 15). Obviously, this broad definition includes a lot of rather different activities, from political activism to the supervision of a football training, which may accordingly be characterized by very different aims, conditions, and structures. The concept s heterogeneity and its consequences become especially evident when it comes to the relationship between welfare state policy and civic engagement. First and foremost, it is not reasonable to assume that welfare state policy equally affects all forms of volunteering. More precisely, extensive welfare policies should, if at all, substitute civic activities that directly compete with public social policy while the effect on other types of volunteering like voluntary activities in culture, sports, leisure or for political purposes can be a very different one. While public services may crowdout civil activities in welfare state related areas, i.e. social action, the converse could be true in other fields (Day and Devlin 1996: 38). This assumption corresponds to Rothstein s (2001: 217, 229) finding for Sweden whereby voluntary organizations have developed quite differently during the last decades. While some areas of the voluntary sector such as social service, health care or elementary education have been weakened, others such as sports, cultural or environmental organizations have grown. Seibel (2009: forthcoming) even argues that civil society may be strong, but mainly as political advocates rather than as providers on the service market. Salamon and Sokolowski (2003: 87) indeed illustrate that a differentiation between various areas of volunteering is important in some cases in order to reveal the relationship between the type of welfare state and a country s level of volunteering. Against this background, this contribution will distinguish between and focus on two forms of civic engagement, namely social and political volunteering. While the first one is most directly related to public welfare state activities and to the crowding out hypothesis, the latter has been most intensively discussed in terms of social stratification and is therefore probably most dependent on a (complementary) resource effect of welfare state policy. Figure 1 gives an overview on the participation rates in social and political volunteering across the OECD countries. Three observations stand out from this illustration. First, the population share that gets socially or politically engaged varies substantially among the 23 countries. While the United States, Great Britain, Canada and Sweden score high on both forms of volunteering, the share of political and social volunteers is quite low in Portugal, Hungary and Germany. Second, the comparison of high income individuals (light gray bars) 4

5 and the low income group (dark grey bars) shows that in some countries civic engagement is very unequally distributed. Mainly in the Anglo-Saxon countries less affluent individuals are substantially underrepresented, while the high income groups shows very high rates of volunteers. In contrast, especially the Scandinavian countries exhibit a somewhat lower level of volunteering, but there is much less difference between social groups. Finally, and related to the aforementioned point, the two figures demonstrate that social volunteering tends to be more equal than political volunteering. Figure 1: Social and political volunteering of low and high income individuals respectively Notes: Share of social and political volunteering respectively, in % of the relevant population group, own calculation. Source: WVS, 4 th wave. Generally, the comments above make clear that countries differ not only in respect of the level of social and political volunteering, but also regarding the social stratification of civic engagement. More importantly, level and equality of volunteering do not systematically correlate: While some countries exhibit high levels of volunteering and a rather equal distribution (e.g. Sweden), others combine high shares of volunteering with a rather unequal participation (e.g., United States, Great Britain). At the same time, at the lower end of the ranking, too, rather equal (Czech Republic) as well as unequal distributions (Portugal) of civic engagement can be found. Theoretical background The question arises as to whether these patterns of volunteering are related to different welfare state efforts among the countries, as especially the welfare state and its redistributive consequences is supposed to impact on a society s social stratification and, thus, probably also on the equality of civic engagement. Of course, it is not new to ask how social stratification of civic engagement can be diminished. Especially in the context of political participation social 5

6 scientists have extensively discussed possibilities of (equal) mobilization. What these studies have clearly shown is, however, that direct and explicit processes of mobilization are not able to reduce inequalities in civic engagement, but rather enforce social stratification. The main reason for the persistent inequality thereby is that those who recruit new activists act as rational prospectors (Schlozman et al. 1999: 445f.): They try to recruit those individuals who will possibly respond positively and who will moreover be effective in his/her activities. Put differently, such mobilization processes driven by the demand for volunteers will typically recruit those individuals who would also participate on their own. In the context of organizations increased professionalization this mechanism can be expected to even gain in importance. Finally, it is reasonable to believe that this logic not only applies to political action but also to areas of civic engagement outside the political sphere. Against the background of this vicious circle this paper argues that indirect processes of mobilization, namely welfare state policy, could be more successful in fostering social equality of civic engagement. As individual resources and values are the most important preconditions for civic engagement policies that impact on these individual characteristics should be able to equalize civic engagement. In other words, welfare state policy does not equally affect an entire population; its effect varies depending on individual resources, values, and behavior patterns (Schmid 1984: 281). Most obviously, the upper social stratum is the main contributor to the welfare state, while lower social classes are typically the beneficiaries of welfare state services. It must therefore be expected that the welfare state context influences various social groups of individuals differently in their propensity for social engagement and eventually impacts on the social stratification of volunteering. The following paragraph therefore discusses the diverse effects of welfare state effort on civic engagement for different social groups (see also Elster 1998). The discussion thereby starts from two theoretical and well-known approaches regarding the relationship between welfare states and civic engagement. The first and most prominent view in this respect suggests that public social services replace civic activities in general (Dahlberg 2005: 743ff.). According to this substitution theory, an extensive welfare state reduces the importance of other actors, such as voluntary organizations, and leads to a crowding out of civic engagement. Formulated in a more positive way, voluntary action emanates from an unsatisfied demand for collective goods that is not met by the state (Salamon and Sokolowski 2003: 78; Weisbrod 1978). In essence, this argumentation is based on the assumption that the supply of social services is a zero-sum game, implying that there is a certain number of tasks to be done and the only question is who will do them (Finsveen and Oorschot 2007: 4). If the state performs these 6

7 tasks, the engagement of civil society is rendered unnecessary and will consequently decrease. The decline in civic engagement will be reinforced due to the lacking responsibility and practice of civil society. In contrast to this view, a second approach assumes that there is a complementary relationship between welfare state and private initiative (Dahlberg 2005: 743ff.). Accordingly, the state and civil society do not necessarily perform the same tasks. Extensive welfare provision should therefore not replace civic activities, but rather provide people with the financial resources and security as well as the free time needed to be involved in voluntary activities also known as the crowding in of civic engagement. Furthermore, universal welfare states in particular decrease the perceived cultural distance between the majority and the bottom (Larsen 2007), thereby fostering the willingness to serve others. Along these lines, an extensive welfare state generates the structural and cultural conditions for a flourishing civil society (Hyden 1997: 13ff.; van Oorschot and Arts 2005: 6). 1 These two approaches form the basis for the formulation of group specific hypotheses for the two types of civic engagement, namely social and political volunteering. Welfare state effects and social volunteering Social volunteering is the form of civic engagement which is theoretically most directly related to welfare state policy. These activities in particular should be substituted by extensive public service provision and, hence, it is the area of volunteering for which it is most likely to find a crowding out tendency. Initially, the crowding out approach is based on the idea that a context of extensive welfare state policy reduces civil society s responsibility to engage voluntarily. At the individual level, this generates specific incentives and conditions for social volunteering generally involving a collective action problem: Volunteering comes at a personal cost, while individual profits are mainly of immaterial nature. For this reason, socially disadvantaged people are rarely involved in voluntary activities. This below average engagement is often ascribed to their lack of resources that do not allow for voluntary involvement or, in terms of the aforementioned collective action logic, they cannot afford the individual costs of volunteering. Additionally, these individuals are less sensitized for community action (Friedman 2003: 15; Gaskin et al. 1996; Wilson and Musick, 1997). In other words, they are less willing to pay the individual costs of volunteering. It can therefore be argued that against the background of this generally low propensity to volunteer, crowding out cannot have a sub- 1 On the other hand, and from a more skeptical point of view, a declining (welfare) state will also lead to a declining civil society (Friedman 2003: 11). 7

8 stantial impact on individuals with low levels of income and education. This population group exhibits the least advantageous preconditions for voluntary work and generally does not consider social volunteering its duty. Whether it is the state or civil society that bears responsibility for public social services therefore does not significantly influence their social engagement. On the other hand, individual volunteering is more likely with increased education and income (Friedman 2003: 15; Gaskin et al. 1996; Wilson and Musick, 1997). Not only do these individuals have the necessary financial and human capital resources, but also they attach higher value to the immaterial gains of volunteering, such as helping others or self-confidence (Brady et al. 1995: 285). In an extensive welfare state, however, these individuals have a strong argument to transfer social responsibility to the state and to refrain from social engagement, as they namely finance the welfare state through taxes and contributions: I already pay a lot for social welfare; therefore, I really don t need to also volunteer in this area. From this perspective, it seems plausible to hypothesize that among well-off individuals there is indeed a withdrawal from social volunteering in an extensive welfare, i.e. crowding out. Unlike the first responsibility-based argumentation, the second approach, based on complementary theory, focuses on welfare state s redistributive consequences that should differently influence social voluntary behavior of social classes. Generally speaking, lower social classes benefit most from an extensive welfare state. As less well-off individuals are the primary recipients of social services and since their level of voluntary engagement is low, due mainly to a lack of individual resources, their civic involvement is, from this point of view, most dependent on public welfare provision (Friedman 2003: 6, 15). It can be hypothesized that an extensive welfare state provides these individuals with financial resources and security and thus eventually with the free time needed for voluntary engagement (van Oorschot and Arts 2005: 6). Moreover, extensive welfare states reduce the consciousness of belonging to the lower class (Larsen 2007), which bolsters the probability of voluntarily serving others. A complementary effect of a generous welfare state on civic engagement can therefore be expected for individuals with low levels of income and education. Individuals with a high socioeconomic status, by contrast, are quite differently affected by welfare state redistribution. While they are important contributors to the welfare state, they benefit less from public social services. Regarding the redistribution of resources, a complementary effect therefore cannot be expected for these individuals. Moreover, as these individuals generally have the necessary resources as well as a strong propensity for volunteering, whereby the latter is based on personal motives of self-expression and development rather than on economic considerations 8

9 (Wilson 2000: 219f.), their voluntary activities can be expected to be fairly independent from extensive welfare state activities. As these comments show, the two approaches suggest different effects of welfare state policy on social volunteering of social groups, but eventually both lead to the same conclusion in terms of equality of social engagement: It can be expected that extensive welfare state policy decreases social inequality of civic engagement, whereby in the first case this is due to a negative effect on higher class individuals but not on lower class citizens, while according to the second argumentation welfare state policy will bolster social engagement of lower social stratums but not of better off individuals. Table 1 summarizes these mechanisms. Table 1: Crowding out and crowding in of social volunteering hypotheses for different social classes and the overall impact on inequality of civic engagement Argument Lower class Higher class Inequality of social volunteering State responsibility (Crowding out) 0 Redistributive consequences (Crowding in) + 0 Total expected effect Note: - = negative relationship expected; + = positive relationship expected; 0 = no relationship expected. Welfare state effects and political volunteering The logics of crowding out and in can also be applied to political volunteering, even though the mechanisms are somewhat different. Against the background of crowding out and following conflict theory of political engagement, it can be argued that there is less conflict and a greater consensus about the shape of policy in more extensive welfare states than in small ones (Solt 2008: 49). As a consequence lower class individuals as well as more affluent individuals are less motivated for political engagement. This can be seen as a crowding out of political volunteering in that extensive redistributive policies render political engagement unnecessary. It can, however, be argued that this negative effect will be more pronounced for well off individuals, for their level of political engagement is higher. Put differently, as the propensity to political volunteering of less affluent and less educated individuals is generally low, more conflict in small welfare states will make less of a difference than it does for higher social classes that have better preconditions to get engaged. In contrast and analogously to the mechanism regarding social volunteering, the crowding in logic clearly suggests a positive effect on political volunteering of less affluent individuals. 9

10 Not only can extensive welfare state services provide these individuals with necessary resources to volunteer, as mentioned before, but extensive welfare state policy can also bolster political awareness of these groups and thus encourage political participation (Solt 2008: 58). In particular, large welfare states will generate a motivation for political civic engagement in order to maintain their position in the welfare state. This resource perspective of political participation, hence, implies that more affluent individuals lose some of their comparative advantage in an extensive welfare state: Their resources decrease through redistribution, while lower class individuals now have relatively more resources to pay the cost of engagement (Solt 2008: 50). It must, however, be mentioned that for these better off individuals the converse effect is also plausible, since the crowding out dynamic in social volunteering discussed above can be seen as a complementary effect from a broader point of view: If social volunteering is rendered unnecessary due to substantial state activities, well-off individuals could invest their resources in other areas of civil society due to their high propensity to volunteer. To sum up, the impact welfare state policy has on the equality of political volunteering is somewhat less clear. The two theoretical approaches tend to predict different effects on political volunteering, which tend however to be unidirectional for low and high income individuals. Still, an equalizing total effect can occur if following the crowding out logic the negative relationship between welfare state effort and political volunteering is stronger for higher classes than it is for lower social groups. Concerning the crowding in logic a neutral, a positive or even a negative effect on equality can be expected (Table 2). Table 2: Crowding out and crowding in of political volunteering hypotheses for different social classes and the overall impact on inequality of civic engagement Argument Lower class Higher class Inequality of social volunteering Less conflict (Crowding out) ( ) Redistributive consequences (Crowding in ) + -/+ /0/ Total expected effect / Note: - = negative relationship expected; + = positive relationship expected; 0 = no relationship expected. Research design, methodological procedures, and operationalisation In the remainder of the paper the hypotheses presented above will be empirically tested. The dependent variables are individual social and political volunteering. For the measurement of 10

11 the dependent variables the following question of the Word Values Survey was considered: Please look carefully at the following list of voluntary organizations and activities and say... for which if any, are you currently doing unpaid voluntary work? 2 Regarding social volunteering, those individuals that indicated a voluntary engagement in one of the following areas were assigned the value of one: voluntary work related to social welfare service for elderly, handicapped or deprived people (a081), local community actions on issues like poverty, employment, housing, racial equality (a086), or concerned with health (a094). All others were allocated the value 0. It must be mentioned that other categories of unpaid work can also be socially motivated (e.g., religious unpaid work, youth work or voluntary activities taking place in the area of third world development and human rights). However, these latter activities are not within the scope of national welfare states and/or include forms of unpaid work without any social orientation. They are therefore not considered for the purpose of the following analyses. For the variable political volunteering individuals that indicated a voluntary engagement in labour unions (a084), political parties or groups (a085), local community actions (a086), professional associations (a089), and women's groups (a092) were assigned the value of one, while all others were allocated the value 0. The question of which activities are part of what is considered as civic engagement, is actually one of the major disagreements in the literature (Boje and Strandh 2005: 4). In the context of this paper, the question of the Word Values Survey seems to be a sensible way of measuring individual civic engagement. It focuses on the area in which voluntary activities take place rather than on organizational aspects, i.e. if it is a formal engagement within an organization or institution, or whether it is rather informal in nature. This corresponds well to the research question of this paper focusing on the subject matter of an engagement. For the crucial independent variable, welfare state effort, the focus is laid on the core areas of welfare state policy (cf., Evers 2005: 738). More precisely, for the construction of the variable based on the OECD Social Expenditure Database (SOCX) public social expenditures as a percentage of GDP in the following categories are summarized: old age, incapacity, family and unemployment related expenditures. These elements of welfare state expenditures are 2 In wave 4 of the WVS respondents could indicate the following categories of civic engagement: social welfare services for elderly, handicapped or deprived people (a081); religious or church organizations (a082); education, arts, music or cultural activities (a083); labour unions (a084); political parties or groups (a085); local community actions on issues like poverty, employment, housing, racial equality (a086); Third world development or human rights (a087); conservation, environment, animal rights groups (a088); professional associations (a089); youth work (scouts, guides, youth clubs, etc.) (a090); sports and recreation (a091); women s groups (a092); peace movements (a093); voluntary organizations concerned with health (a094). The variable names in brackets refer to the pooled data set

12 most directly related to both civil society s activities and possible welfare state resource effects. Conversely, health related expenditures which contain mainly medical goods, while cash benefits related to sickness are recoded under incapacity-related benefits (OECD 2007: 15) as well as the categories housing and active labor market programs are excluded, since they cover public expenditures which are much less directly connected to individual civic activities. 3 Social expenditures as a percentage of GDP is the most widely used indicator of welfare effort in empirical literature. While such expenditure based welfare state indicators have often be criticized for neglecting the various dimensions of welfare state policy and for assuming that all spending counts equally (Esping-Andersen 1990: 19), we follow Castles (2008: 60) who has recently shown that a disaggregated expenditures approach is very useful for establishing not only the variety of what welfare states do, but also the determinants and the outcomes of such interventions. The proposed GDP-related variable can be seen as a measure for the importance of welfare state policy relative to a country s overall resources. While almost all countries have been influenced by similar trends and challenges to the welfare state in recent years the country-specific conceptions of the welfare state have proven to be very stable over time (and so have country differences in social expenditures). In order to explain individual civic engagement several individual characteristics need to be integrated into the analysis (cf., Salamon and Sokolowski 2003: 77; Wilson 2000). Socioeconomic status is the central individual factor and will be measured in terms of the levels of education and income. A high level of education and financial resources is related to a high propensity and probability to volunteer. We refrain from integrating an occupational variable, which is often used to measure social class differences. In the context of volunteering, which is precisely an activity outside the labor market, such a restriction would exclude respondents not integrated into the labor market and, hence, an important group of volunteers (e.g., housewives, pensioners, students). Still, a high degree of social integration (e.g., through employment) is expected to increase the likelihood of an engagement. Furthermore, sociodemographic factors such as age and gender should influence an individual s civic activities. Finally, religious values are incorporated into the models, which can be linked to an individual s propensity to altruistic behavior. At the contextual level and in addition to the central 3 The OECD data further differentiates between cash benefits and benefits in kind. It could be assumed that cash benefits are more narrowly related to a resource effect according to complementary theory, while benefits in kind are at the core of crowding out hypothesis in terms of service provision. In practise, it is however not sensible to integrate this distinction into the analysis. On the one hand, benefits in kind have typically also a (financial) resource effect; on the other hand the distinction does not matter for the question of whether the state is responsible for social service provision. 12

13 policy variable, a country s GDP is integrated into the models in order to control for different degrees of economic and social development. 4 To model causality, we use the values of the contextual factors measured prior to More detailed information on the variables (operationalisation and sources) as well as descriptive statistics can be found in the appendix. Keeping our research question in mind, we face hierarchical data structures, i.e. individuals are nested within institutional contexts and supposed to be influenced by this context. Therefore, we apply random intercept models implying that individual behavior can vary between countries (Jones 1997, Steenbergen and Jones 2002). Additionally, such a multilevel model allows for the modeling of macro-level characteristics (in the present case, the welfare state context), which explain the variance at the country-level. Finally, cross-level interactions (including random slopes) are calculated in order to model group-specific welfare state effects. As the dependent variable is dichotomous, individual volunteering is transformed to a logit structure. Estimation, as well as interpretation of the coefficients, is similar to conventional logit analysis. The model applied takes the following form: logit(π ij )= β 0 + β 1 X 1ij β kj X kij β n X nij + α 1 W 1j α l W lj α n W nj γw lj X kij + μ oj + μ lij X kij + ε ij π ij specifies the probability that individual i in country j performs voluntary work. This probability is explained by the overall mean (β 0 ), individual variables (X, their estimates β respectively), the characteristics of the countries (W, their estimates α respectively) as well as a random part for both countries (μ oj ) and individuals (ε ij ). Since in every model one cross-level interaction is modeled, the subscripts k and l refer to the k th individual variable which is randomized and interacted with the l th contextual variable (X*W, their estimate γ respectively). With this approach, not only are differences between individuals and contexts modeled, but also differences in the effects of independent variables (μ lij X kij ). 4 Even though GDP is part of the measure of social spending, the GDP-variable as such is also integrated into the models for two reasons. First, a correlation analysis demonstrates that the relationship between the level of GDP (logarithmized) and social spending as a percentage of GDP is only weak (Pearson s R = 0.29). This shows that GDP should still be integrated into the models in order to control for the level of economic and social development. Second, the GDP variable also accounts for a shortcoming of the social spending variable: the welfare state indicator not only depends on public social spending, but also on GDP meaning that high values in this indicator can be driven both by substantial social spending and low GDP. 13

14 Empirical results In this section, models analyzing the influence of the welfare state context on individual social and political volunteering are presented. First, preliminary analyses demonstrate that the respective probability of social and political volunteering substantially differs among the OECD countries. 5 The variance coefficients at the country level are significantly different from 0 in both models and this finding continues to hold when individual characteristics are controlled for, indicating that country-differences in civic engagement are not due to differences in population structure. Basically, the statistically significant contextual variance of individual volunteering provides support for multilevel analysis and, more specifically, for the modeling of a welfare state context. The central hypotheses of this contribution can be tested by modeling interaction effects assessing the effect of welfare state policy on different social groups. Following Larsen (2007), welfare regimes generate very dissimilar living conditions, mainly at the bottom of society. Therefore, and in order to keep the model as concise as possible, two dummy variables are created that take the value of 1 if an individual belongs to the lowest respective levels of income and educational achievement. Individuals with medium or high levels of respective income and education are assigned the values of 0. Table 3 presents the impact of welfare state policy on social and political volunteering. The following initial results can be concluded from Table 3: Men have a lower probability of social volunteering than women, while the contrary is true regarding political volunteering. Both forms of volunteering tend to first increase and then to decrease as an individual gets older. An employment increases the probability of a political engagement. The significantly higher probability of social volunteering of those outside the labor market can be seen against the background of the above-average engagement of housewives in this area. Religious persons exhibit a higher propensity to civic engagement in general. Finally, at the contextual level, the degree of economic development in terms of GDP per capita somewhat bolsters civic engagement, but only one of the four coefficients is statistically significant. In respect of the crucial independent variables of this paper, namely income, education and welfare state effort, the marginal effects cannot directly be seen from the regression table when modelling interaction terms. While the single coefficient for welfare state effort, for example, stands for the impact of welfare state expenditures for individuals with medium/high income and education, respectively, the marginal effect for individuals from lower social 5 The analysis includes the OECD-countries with the exception of Australia, Korea, New Zealand, Norway and Switzerland, as data for these countries is lacking. 14

15 classes amounts to the sum of this single coefficient and the interaction coefficient. For the calculation of the standard errors, the variance/covariance matrix of the coefficients must be taken into account. Tables 4 and 5 present the results of these calculations, displaying the marginal effects of the welfare state context on social and political volunteering depending on an individual s respective levels of education and income. Table 3: Overall context effect of welfare state policy on social and political volunteering Social volunteering Political volunteering Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 Fixed effects Constant -1.31** (0.64) (0.71) (0.65) 1.02 (0.67) Sex (male) -0.25*** (0.05) -0.25*** (0.05) 0.16*** (0.04) 0.16*** (0.04) Age 0.02*** (0.00) 0.02*** (0.00) 0.02*** (0.00) 0.02*** (0.00) Age squared 0.00*** (0.00) 0.00*** (0.00) 0.00*** (0.00) 0.00*** (0.00) Not employed 0.10* (0.06) 0.09 (0.06) -0.33*** (0.06) -0.33*** (0.06) Religious person 0.38*** (0.05) 0.37*** (0.05) 0.13*** (0.05) 0.13** (0.05) Low education (0.45) -0.47*** (0.05) -0.86** + (0.43) -0.54*** (0.05) Low income -0.10* (0.05) -0.85** + (0.27) -0.26*** (0.05) -0.63** + (0.30) GDP (logarithmized) 0.77 (0.66) 1.29* (0.73) 0.13 (0.67) 0.43 (0.69) Welfare state -0.04* (0.02) -0.06** (0.02) -0.04* (0.02) -0.04* (0.02) Welfare state*low education (0.02) 0.01 (0.02) Welfare state*low income 0.03*** (0.01) 0.01 (0.01) Random Effects Individual level variance 1 (0) 1 (0) 1 (0) 1 (0) Contextual level variance 0.30*** (0.10) 0.37*** (0.12) 0.31*** (0.10) 0.33*** (0.10) N (23) (23) (23) (23) Note: log-odds, standard errors in brackets. All models were calculated using the second order penalized quasi-likelihood method and RIGLS (Goldstein and Rasbash 1996). * = significant at the 10 % level, **= significant at the 5% level, *** = significant at the 1% level. + = Variable randomized at the individual level. The results demonstrate that public welfare state provisions do not affect all individuals equally. Concerning higher social classes (both in terms of education and income), we find a negative and significant effect of extensive welfare state policy on the probability of both 15

16 forms of volunteering. These results lend support to the crowding out argument: In countries that spend a high share of their GDP on welfare policy, the probability of social and political voluntary engagement by well-off individuals is significantly lower than in small welfare states. Against the background of the theoretical discussion this can be interpreted to mean that affluent individuals in an extensive welfare state transfer social responsibility to the state and refrain from social engagement, as they namely finance the welfare state through taxes and contributions. At the same time, the negative marginal effect on political volunteering implies that these individuals do not shift their engagement from social to political volunteering. The negative relationship between welfare state effort and political civic engagement rather supports conflict theory suggesting that political participation is lower in large welfare states due to a lower level of political conflict. Table 4: Group-specific welfare state effects on social volunteering Marginal effect of welfare state effort dependent on the level of education Low -0.06** Middle/High -0.04* income Low Middle/High -0.06** Note: All models were calculated using the second order penalized quasi-likelihood method and RIGLS (Goldstein and Rasbash 1996). **= marginal welfare state effect is significant at the 5% level, *= marginal welfare state effect is significant at the 10% level; grey: group-differences (between low and middle/high income) are statistically significant at the 1% level. All models control for individual variables and a country s wealth (GDP) as shown in Models 1 and 2, Table 3. Table 5: Group-specific welfare state effects on political volunteering Marginal effect of welfare state effort dependent on the level of education Low Middle/High -0.04* income Low Middle/High -0.04* Note: All models were calculated using the second order penalized quasi-likelihood method and RIGLS (Goldstein and Rasbash 1996). *= marginal welfare state effect is significant at the 10% level; All models control for individual variables and a country s wealth (GDP) as shown in Models 3 and 4, Table 3. With regards to the lowest social stratum, the findings are different. In fact, the marginal welfare state effects are not significant for these individuals. This result is in line with the expectation that welfare state activities will not negatively influence those individuals that generally 16

17 exhibit a very low propensity to volunteer. An exception is however social volunteering of the lowest education group which is again characterized by a crowding out tendency. Overall, these findings indeed corroborate the central hypothesis of this paper whereby welfare state policy reduces social inequality of civic participation. As extensive welfare states tend to decrease social and political volunteering of affluent individuals but not of lower class citizens, this eventually means that civic engagement is more equal. This conclusion is further supported by the fact that welfare state policy significantly moderates the influence of low affluence: A negative effect of low income on social and political volunteering can only be found in small welfare states. 6 Figure 3 illustrates this point depicting the marginal effect of low income on the two forms of volunteering for different levels of welfare state effort. Figure 2: Marginal effect of low income on social and political volunteering respectively Note: left: graph based on Model 2, Table 3; right: graph based on Model 4, Table 3. In small welfare states, low income clearly and negatively influences the probability of social and political voluntary engagement, respectively. However, as we move to countries with a more extensive welfare state, this negative effect of low financial resources diminishes and ultimately fails to reach statistical significance. If a country spends more than 26.3% of GDP on old age, incapacity, family, and unemployment benefits low income does not any more significantly decrease social volunteering. This applies to nearly half of the countries, including Luxembourg and the Scandinavian countries, but also the traditional continental welfare states of France, Austria, Germany, and Italy. For political volunteering the negative impact of low education disappears if a country spends more than 31.6% of GDP on social policy, 6 Again the marginal effect of low income is dependent on the level of social spending and amounts to the sum of this single coefficient and the interaction coefficient multiplied by the level of social spending (e.g., for Model 2 the marginal effect of low income amounts to *welfare state effort). 17

18 which is the case in Luxembourg, Austria, Spain, Poland, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, and France. These findings not only demonstrate that the modeling of random effects reveals and confirms varying income effects among OECD countries, but also that we can speak of an indirect positive effect of high welfare state expenditures on civic engagement. In contrast, the effect educational achievements have on civic engagement is not systematically moderated by welfare state effort, but remains highly significant across all countries. Considering this context, it is not surprising that welfare state effects can be found for low income, but not in the presence of low education. Income is the main eligibility criteria for welfare benefits, while the individual level of education is not always a good indicator for welfare state dependency. Against this background, the different findings for education and income can be interpreted to mean that an (indirect) positive welfare state effect is indeed closely linked to a resource effect. Extensive robustness analyses have been conducted that show that the findings presented are very robust to alternative model specifications and measurements. First, alternative operationalizations of social volunteering, including or omitting categories of unpaid work (e.g., local community action, youth work), did not alter the findings. Second, slightly different measurements of welfare state effort, including or omitting particular SOCX-spending categories (e.g., health), lead to the same conclusions. Third, it could be argued that measuring social class by simple dummy variables is too limited. However, a different operationalization, be it the use of three categories (high, middle, low income/education) or even a metric variable distinguishing eight educational levels (variable x025 in the WVS) and 10 income deciles (x047), respectively, confirms the findings presented in this paper and shows that the simple 1/0-categorization is not only reasonable with respect to the small number of cases at level 2, but also captures the essential group differences regarding welfare state effects. Fourth, further models not presented here included a number of other potential contextual controlling variables in various combinations. Indicators measuring ethnic and religious heterogeneity, income inequality, the age structure, the share of Catholics and Protestants, the level of schooling, a dummy for former communist countries, as well as measures for democratic development and stability did not improve the explanatory power of the model, nor did they influence the reported results. Finally, a Bayesian estimation approach, 7 which is particularly suited for small-n designs, alternative link functions (e.g., complementary log-log, which assumes that a positive outcome is a rare event), as well as extensive outlier analyses, confirmed the presented findings ,000 iterations, burn-in 50,000, slightly informative priors (mean = 0, standard deviation 10,000). 18

19 Conclusion Can welfare state policy impact on the social stratification of civic engagement? Against the background of two competing propositions, one of which assumes a fostering effect of public social services on volunteering, the other a crowding out of civil society s activities, the preceding analyses sought to clarify this matter. The focus on social and political volunteering was chosen because the first type of voluntary engagement is theoretically most closely linked both to welfare state activities and to the crowding out hypothesis, while the second one is probably most dependent on a complementary welfare state effect due to the particularly strong social stratification. The findings can be summarized as follows: First, the effect welfare state policy has on individual volunteering is indeed not uniform across social classes. While social and political volunteering for the middle and upper social classes is characterized by a crowding out tendency, this is different for less affluent and less educated individuals. This latter group typically comprises the main recipients of welfare state services; the welfare state provides them with resources not only for everyday life, but also for volunteering. Put differently, individuals with low income can re-invest welfare state provisions in civic activities, thereby compensating for their lack of individual resources. The finding is of practical relevance and eventually means that welfare states have the potential to equalize individual civic participation. Given that inequality of (social and political) participation gains in importance due to increased professionalization of civil society and the Rise of the Unelected (Vibert 2007), this potential must not be underestimated. However, this paper s analyses illustrate that there might be a dilemma of whether we want to maximize the share of people that gets voluntarily engaged or the equality of civic participation, as an extensive welfare state seems to rather decrease than increase a countries total share of political and social volunteers. Formulated in a different way, this can be interpreted to mean that civil society can to some extent compensate for extensive welfare state policy. At the same time and from a substantial point of view however, the relatively high level of social and political volunteering in small welfare states like Great Britain, Canada, or the US takes place at the expense of socially unequal civic participation. Our results, thus, once again corroborate the notion that welfare state effort and civic engagement is not a zero sum game (Finsveen and Oorschot 2007: 4). As processes of crowding out and crowding in go hand-inhand, public welfare services cannot be retrenched and civil society will just take over; rather a stronger role of civil society may be at the expense of an increase in unequal participation. 19