On solidarity and volunteering during the COVID-19 crisis in Denmark: the impact of social networks and social media groups on the distribution of support

ABSTRACT

This paper unfolds how informal civil society quickly mobilised citizen-to-citizen support when government and non-government organisations locked down during the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper focuses on two elements of the mobilisation: the role of social networks and social media groups. It reveals that the vast majority of this support was distributed through existing social networks and, therefore, not available to those lacking social connections. However, we also find that social media groups played an important role in the mobilisation, that support organised on social media does not diverge significantly in commitment or kind from support organised in other settings. The paper concludes by discussing the potential of social media to mitigate the impact of social networks on the distribution of support, pointing to some of the potential barriers to social media groups’ successful facilitation of support to those without a social network.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• volunteering
• welfare
• social media
• solidarity

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to our research assistant Mia Lunding Christensen as well as student research assistants Esben Brøgger Lemminger, Marie Haarmark Nielsen and Jonathan Holm Salka for their skillful work on collecting and preparing data for this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Independent Research Fund Denmark (Grant number: 0213-00028B/PI: Jonas Toubøl and Hjalmar Bang Carlsen) and the Faculty of Social Science, University of Copenhagen. Jonas Toubøl's research was supported by the Carlsberg Foundation (grant number: CF17-0199/PI: Jonas Toubøl). The research was furthermore made possible by support from the ERC project DISTRACT, SODAS and the Department of Sociology.

Notes on contributors

Hjalmar Bang Carlsen

Hjalmar Bang Carlsen, Ph.D., is a postdoctoral researcher at SODAS and Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen. His research interests are political sociology, especially social movements and issue politics, and digital social research methodologies that combine quantitative and qualitative approaches in the study of social interaction and social change.

Jonas Toubøl

Jonas Toubøl, Ph.D., is a political sociologist at Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen. His area of research encompasses social movements, civil society, unionization and social class. In addition, Jonas explores new approaches to mixed methods and data triangulation of both quantitative and qualitative data combining interview, ethnography, register, survey and social media data.

Benedikte Brincker

Benedikte Brincker, Ph.D., is the Head of Department at Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen. She has published widely in the field of political and historical sociology, especially in the area of state-nation relations. She has applied this body of theory to European nation states and to the Arctic Region and has combined it with research in the field of sociology of education and public administration.