Social Volunteering in Welfare States: Where Crowding Out Should Occur

This article evaluates the influence of welfare state policy on individual social volunteering. Unlike previous studies that have investigated the relationship between the welfare state and civic engagement, this contribution focuses on those areas of civil society that are most directly related to public welfare state activities. Moreover, it is assumed that welfare state policy does not uniformly affect the civic engagement of various social groups. The analyses provide support for the crowding out hypothesis: individual social volunteering is lower in extensive welfare states than it is in countries that spend less on welfare state policy. However, when group-specific welfare state effects are modelled, it is revealed that the crowding out effect of public social services does not hold for the low-income group. Additionally, extensive welfare policy reduces the negative effect of low affluence on social volunteering. Crowding out and crowding in thus go hand in hand: while state activities indeed serve as a substitute for social volunteering in some places, in others they are found to have a stimulating effect.