Are Social Inequalities in Volunteering in Scandinavia Increasing?

Civil society is an important arena for social participation and for developing civic skills and virtues that may have a spillover effect on political involvement according to several influential studies (Almond & Verba, 1963; Burns, Schlozman, & Verba, 2001; Putnam, 1993; Tocqueville, 2000 [1835]). Previous research has shown that volunteering for voluntary organizations in Scandinavia is high in international comparison. The share of adults that volunteers at least once in a year is increasing since the beginning of the nineties and reached 61 percent in Norway (Folkestad, Christensen, Strømsnes, & Selle, 2015) and reached 53 percent in Sweden in 2014 (Essen, Jegermalm & Svedberg 2015: 12), but stable at 38 percent in Denmark (Fridberg & Henriksen 2014: 34). With the erosion of collective identities, that was a precondition for the traditional popular movements with broad social participation (Sivesind & Selle, 2010), participation may become more based on reflexive choice (Hustinx & Lammertyn, 2003). Volunteers have instrumental motivations, shift more often from one organization to another, and are less often members of the organization. This kind of participation demands more competence and resources, and consequently social inequality among volunteers may be increasing. A previous study looking at data from World Values Survey from 1990 and 2007 found that social inequality in Norway increases more rapidly than in Sweden and Finland, partly because of increase in sports, culture and recreation, that tend to have a more skewed social profile than other subsectors (Enjolras & Wollebæk, 2010). A later study, based on ESS 2002, EVS 2008 and Eurobarometer 2011, confirmed that individual resources has a stronger effect on participation in Norway than the other Nordic countries (Arnesen, Folkestad, & Gjerde, 2013). A problem with these large multinational datasets is that the questions about volunteering are very crude. However, there are large national surveys with better questions and more probing about volunteering for different types of organizations tend to give higher levels of volunteering and more consistent results over time. These surveys are also more consistent with state-of-the-art on measurement of volunteer work (ILO, 2011). For the first time these Scandinavian data sets from 1992 to 2014 have been merged to one file. This makes it possible to make more robust analyses of changes in volunteering than previously. We test the following hypotheses generated from the previous studies: 1 Social inequalities in volunteering in Scandinavia is increasing 2 Individual resources has a stronger effect on participation over time in Norway compared to the other Scandinavian countries 3 The increasing social inequalities in volunteering results from increase in sports, culture and recreation. 4 Volunteers shift organization more often and are to a less extent members of the organization, which is consistent with a more reflexive type of volunteering