A Cross-National Comparison of the Internal Effects of Participation in Voluntary Organizations
| Author | Marc Morjé Howard,Leah Gilbert |
| Date | 01 March 2008 |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2007.00715.x |
| Published date | 01 March 2008 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
A Cross-National Comparison of the
Internal Effects of Participation in Voluntary
Organizations
Marc Morjé Howard and Leah Gilber t
Georgetown University
This article draws on two recent and largely untapped sources of data to test empirically theTocquevillian
argument about the impact of involvement in civic organizations on individual attitudes and behaviors.
Our analysis is based on two related studies – the European Social Survey(ESS) and the US ‘Citizenship,
Involvement, Democracy’ (CID) survey – that incorporate innovative and detailed measures about
respondents’ involvement in voluntary associations in nineteen European countries and in the United
States. These surveys provide us not only with rich individual-level data within a cross-national
comparison, but they also allow us to develop and test a new measure of civic involvement that
distinguishes between different levels of participation.After employing our ‘civic involvement index’ in
pooled and individual country analyses, we find general support for the Tocquevillian argument. On
average,those persons with greater levels of involvement in voluntary organizations also engage in more
political acts, have higher life satisfaction and are by and large more trusting of others than those who do
not. These findings highlight the general importance of actual involvement as opposed to nominal
membership.
In his penetrating analysis of political life in mid-nineteenth-century America,
Alexis de Tocqueville emphasized the importance of face-to-face interaction in
civic associations as the bedrock of American democracy.Without active partici-
pation in organizations, Tocqueville believed that extreme individualism and
equality would sever the ties that bind people together to work for the common
good. It is through such interaction that ‘feelings and ideas are renewed,the heart
enlarged, and under standing developed’ (Tocqueville, 1969, p. 515). In
Tocqueville’s view,par ticipation in groups produces not only a sense of interde-
pendence among those who take part, but also a habit of association. In this way,
interaction in voluntary organizations results in virtuous circles of cooperation
and political involvement, effectively creating ‘schools of democracy’
(Tocqueville, 1969, p. 522).
Over a century and a half later,Tocqueville’s ideas have been applied in a more
systematic fashion by a number of ‘neo-Tocquevillian’ social scientists. Most
prominently, Robert Putnam (1993; 2000) emphasizes both the ‘inter nal’ and
‘external’ effects of participation in voluntary associations.1The internal effects
refer to the benefits that individual participants themselves receive – their demo-
cratic attitudes and/or behavior – while the external effects involve the link
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2007.00715.x
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2008 VOL 56, 12–32
© 2008The Authors. Journal compilation © 2008 Political StudiesAssociation
between civic associations and democratic performance, and both have received
a great deal of attention in the literatures on social capital and civil society.2
This article focuses on the internal effects of participation in voluntary organi-
zations, and it makes two specific contributions to an already rich literature.
First, we develop a new operationalization of civic involvement that distinguishes
between different levels of par ticipation in a more sensitive and nuanced way than
in most other survey-based studies. Second, not only do we apply our ‘Civic
Involvement Index’ to one society, but we add a wide-ranging comparative
perspective that allows us to measure the internal effects of participation in a
variety of different social and institutional contexts.
Our analysis is based on two related studies – the European Social Survey (ESS)
and the US ‘Citizenship, Involvement, Democracy’ (CID) survey – that incor-
porate innovative and detailed measures about respondents’ involvement in vol-
untary associations in nineteen European countries and in the United States. This
provides us with rich individual-level data, and it allows us to test various
hypotheses in a truly comparative and cross-national perspective.
In this article, after reviewing the theoretical and empirical debates about the
internal effects of participation in voluntary associations, we develop two different
measures of organizational involvement for our analysis. The first allows us to
distinguish between four types of people, which we label inactive,passive, active
and super-active. Since this measure is derived from the ESS and was also
replicated in the CID survey, we can apply it to all twenty countr ies, although for
presentation purposes we show results that distinguish between three country
groupings: the US,Western Europe and Eastern Europe. The second measure was
applied only in the CID survey, and is therefore restricted to the American
sample.It captures how frequently respondents actually participate in the activities
of voluntary organizations (whether a few times a week, a few times a month,
etc.). Both of these measures contribute to greater measurement validity, since
they provide a more nuanced picture of people’s levels of involvement.
We then employ these new measures of organizational involvement as indepen-
dent variables within regression analysis that seeks to explain three different
dependent variables that should be closely linked to participation in civil society:
political action, life satisfaction and interpersonal trust. This allows us to test
whether civil society participation actually provides the associated internal ben-
efits that its advocates have long claimed, or to see if skepticism is warranted.
As it turns out, our results provide general support for the Tocquevillian argu-
ment. On average, those persons with greater levels of involvement in voluntary
organizations also engage in more political acts, have higher life satisfaction and
are (for the most part) more trusting than those who do not, even when
controlling for important demographic factors. Although these findings provide
only an initial examination of the internal effects of participation, they highlight
THE INTERNAL EFFECTS OF PARTICIPATION 13
© 2008The Authors. Journal compilation © 2008 Political StudiesAssociation
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2008, 56(1)
To continue reading
Request your trial