A Call to Service

In 2010, British Prime Minister David Cameron announced his Big Society program. Designed to unburden Britain’s economic crisis, the Conservative Party touted Big Society as a tool to reduce government spending while encouraging altruistic citizens to become more active in community service, under the assumption that if the government provides fewer services, people will volunteer more of their time to maintain the services they value.

In a recent article, Koen Bartels, Guido Cozzi, and Noemi Mantovan explore the statistical relationship between government expenditures and volunteering using data collected in the United Kingdom from 1991 through 2007 on government expenditures, British households, and volunteer activities. Focusing on employed individuals, the authors find that contrary to the theories behind the Big Society program, a decrease in government spending is associated with a decrease in volunteering.

Previous studies have identified retired citizens and young adults as more likely to volunteer due to flexibility in their time and as an investment in their future careers. However, Bartels, Cozzi, and Mantovan focus their study on employed individuals on the grounds that employed individuals have higher opportunity costs, and therefore are more effective in illustrating the relationship between government expenditures and volunteering. Endowed with a certain amount of time, each individual must appropriate that time to activities considered of importance and receive a certain payoff from those activities. The authors posit that an individual provides unpaid labor because he benefits from the aggregate utility society receives from volunteering. Another key factor in society’s aggregate utility, the authors argue, is government expenditures. As such, employed individuals consider government expenditures in their allocation of time to volunteer work.

The authors regress the likelihood of a person to volunteer on total government expenditures. The data reveals that decreases in total expenditures were strongly correlated with a decrease in the probability that an individual would volunteer. Taking into consideration education, children, marital status, and interest in education, the authors find a statistically significant relationship between a decrease in government expenditures and a decreased likelihood of volunteering.

To help understand why decreasing government expenditures leads to less volunteering, the authors also conduct 19 interviews with residents, city council employees, and public service agencies in Glasgow, Scotland. From these interviews, the authors identify two causes for the reduction in volunteering. First, a lack of government-funded volunteering infrastructure forces volunteers to withdraw support from organizations. Volunteering in professional environments requires professional support and internal organization. If volunteering institutions do not have the funds to provide leadership or training, the lack of structure can be stressful and may lead volunteers to abort their services. Secondly, the authors argue that people volunteer with the goal of making a difference. However, an organization without adequate funding is ineffective and is thus unable to recruit volunteers.

In their analysis of government spending and volunteering, the authors cast serious doubt on the hypothesis that decreasing government spending would promote volunteerism. Instead, the authors recommend three goals to ensure continued volunteer service in Great Britain and abroad. First, government funds should support public services to keep volunteer levels from plummeting. Second, volunteers must consider the work worthwhile. Combining recommendations one and two, the authors’ final recommendation is that government funds should be used to strengthen volunteer support and training infrastructures.

Feature Photo: cc/nvidia.corporation