To volunteer or not to volunteer? A cross-country study of volunteering

This paper uses data from the 4th wave of the European Values Survey (EVS) to investigate the factors that influence the decision to participate in volunteering activities, considering both volunteering in general as well as volunteering in particular types of activities.
Like previous studies we include several socioeconomic and demographic variables. However our study also includes attitudinal variables and country dummy variables that capture the impact of country specific factors. Our results show that there are significant differences across countries in the propensity for volunteering and that the determinants of volunteering are quite different for the various types of volunteering.