DOES VOLUNTEERING CAUSE TRUST?

ABSTRACT

Social capital theory expects volunteering to generate general social trust, while critics point out that there is little evidence to support this claim. The purpose of this article is to show that volunteering can cause trust, depending on the institutional context and the types of organizations for which people volunteer. The data are from representative population surveys conducted in Norway and the Czech Republic in 2009. The analysis shows that in institutional contexts with impartial and reliable institutions, as in the case of Norway, general social trust is very high in comparative perspective, and the experience of volunteering has little additional effect. However, volunteering boosts institutional trust because volunteers get in touch with a political and administrative system that supports and interacts with the voluntary sector. This applies particularly to voluntary organizations in culture, sports, and recreation. In contrast, in an institutional context with elements of clientelism and corruption, as in the case of the Czech Republic, there is no positive effect on institutional trust. However, the level of general social trust is low and the collaborative experience of volunteering can generate social trust. This applies particularly to voluntary organizations that are not associated with the established political culture.

Keywords:

• social capital
• social trust
• institutional trust
• volunteering
• voluntary organizations

Notes

¹See for example: http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTSOCIALDEVELOPMENT/EXTTSOCIALCAPITAL/0,,contentMDK:20185225~menuPK:418213~pagePK:148956~piPK:216618~theSitePK:401015,00.html http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTSOCIALDEVELOPMENT/EXTSMALLGRANTS/0,,menuPK:952550~pagePK:64168427~piPK:64168435~theSitePK:952535,00.html http://ec.europa.eu/europeaid/what/civil-society/ http://www.eeagrants.org/id/1355 http://www.mott.org/about/programs/civilsociety/europeandrussia.aspx

² http://www.transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/gcb/2010/results

³A theoretical argument against an index with such a broad set of institutions could be that there are different types of institutional trust. Trust in order institutions, i.e., army, legal institutions, and police, may have a strong correlation with general social trust, in contrast to trust in political institutions, i.e., parliament, governments, political parties, and civil service (Rothstein and Stolle 2008). We have tried to run the regressions in this article replacing the broad institutional trust index with an index with just trust in police and courts of law but came out with essentially identical findings. For these data sets, it will not make much difference to look at different types of institutional trust.

⁴In Norway volunteering is only weakly correlated with social trust (.11**) and institutional trust (.06**), while the correlation between social and institutional trust is .26**. In the Czech Republic, the correlation between volunteering and social trust is .20** and institutional trust is .09**, whereas the correlation between social and institutional trust is a little stronger with .48**. We also checked for interaction between volunteering and institutional trust, but only found one statistically significant effect.