Volunteering, social participation and democracy – the heart of matter

In this article we suggest that volunteering shows us a more inclusive and human side of democracy than is normally represented in formal democratic institutions. When faced with official hype about extending social participation, we might expect some cynicism about the claim that volunteering has a democratising potential.

However, for those who give freely of their time and labour, there is a link between voluntary activity and the classical idea of a polis whereby politics refers to a realm of civic participation. When citizens volunteer to help others, social participation means more than just a set of strategies for balancing the budget.

Volunteering helps to remind us that, no matter how complex and distant some social institutions have become, the roots of any just political system are still deeply grounded in real social relationships based on trust and care. We believe that here, in the webs of social connection and the compassionate impulses that support them, lies a potential to renovate democratic practices and renew our sense of civility.

Volunteering social networks and social capital

Since the mid-1990s, social capital has rapidly become the dominant framework in Australia for interpreting volunteering. Both researchers and government agencies have readily accepted the links between volunteering, social capital and democracy.

However, in government practices aimed at maximising ‘social participation’ such as ‘The Mutual Obligations Requirements’, the concept of social capital has not been used primarily to emphasise the caring orientation of voluntary organisations or how they might expand our conception of what it means to be civil. Instead, they have an instrumental value for governments.

This utilitarian function is based on a quality economists call ‘fungibility’, that is, treating goods as interchangeable. On this view, the networks, norms and trust built for one purpose can be used for another. For example, a movement created to stage the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras can also be used to spread information about HIV/AIDS and safe sex.

Economists also distinguish between private and public goods. Whereas a private good is someone’s exclusive possession, public goods are not – one person’s use of public goods does not deprive others of them. The costs and benefits of public goods, which are not reflected in market prices, are called ‘externalities’.

As Putnam notes, the stock of social connectedness stored in social capital ‘can have externalities that affect the wider community, so that not all the cost and benefits accrue to the person making’ the actual social connection.

These two elements of social capital – their fungibility and their externalities – make the notion of social capital irresistible to governments. Not only do networks of volunteers represent a resource which can be redeemed at other levels, governments are also able to ‘free-ride’, since what those networks produce - good health, a lower crime rate and a general improvement in social functioning in virtually all institutions – is regarded as costless.

What is more, governments are able to justify all this in the name of maximising democracy through extending social participation.

However, all this emphasis on the utilitarian benefits of social networks has blinded policy makers to important differences in types of social capital and the sorts of social networks that have genuine democratising potential.

According to Robert Putnam there are two types of social networks – vertical and horizontal. Horizontal networks bring together ‘agents of equivalent status and power’. However, vertical networks, eg patriarchal families, link ‘unequal agents in asymmetric relations of hierarchy and dependence’, and are therefore capable neither of facilitating democracy nor of generating genuine civic-mindedness.

As Putnam has argued, within vertical networks, ‘[d]efection, distrust, shirking, exploitation, isolation, disorder, and stagnation intensify one another in a suffocating miasma of vicious circles’. In contrast, the social alliances with the greatest potential for democratising public institutions have a democratic or horizontal internal structure characterised by open friendly relations between citizens who see themselves as equals.

Sociability

At the heart of horizontal networks is something we can call sociability. As distinct from the emphasis on the outward features of social networks, sociability stresses the internal properties of social relations - our subjective experience of relating.

Sociability is modelled on friendship relations. A core element of sociability is the recognition of a need for the company of others and the pleasure derived from association.

Good friends try to spend time together because that is an end in itself. Relations between friends are voluntary and also based on a sense of equality and on what we might call ‘affective mutuality’ .

This sense of sociability and an optimistic orientation towards others underpins democratic forms of voluntary association. But in order to see the relevance this has for democracy, we need to explain the link between sociability and the formation of a civic identity – the awareness that we are acting in concert with fellow citizens who are strangers and not people we have ever met.

Reciprocity

That link can be found in the notion of reciprocity. According to Putnam, the touchstone of social capital is a principle of generalised reciprocity that, he argues, is a close cousin of civility. This in turn may be understood to refer to a sense of fair play towards a ‘generalized other’.

These ideas of civility and generalised reciprocity are crucial to the argument. They direct attention to the fact that we are talking about our treatment of people with whom we have no personal relationship. They are ideas that explain an attitude of trust towards people we do not actually know, and a willingness to do things for them.

Reciprocity also explains why individuals might subjugate their own self-interest. In Putnam’s words:

"I’ll do this for you now, without expecting anything immediately in return and perhaps without even knowing you, confident that down the road you or someone else will return the favour."

Reciprocity, then, is an essentially sociable impulse rather than an individualistic one, since it is built on feelings of optimism and confidence about the giving of fair treatment to other members of society and receiving the same from them.

Sociability refers to the general features of relationships that enable us to build trust and make connections with others. When we extend this conduct towards people we don’t know, we transform sociability into a capacity for democratic organisation – which is precisely what social capital means.

Putnam’s thesis of civic disengagement

Putnam’s claims about a current decline in civic engagement have found a ready audience among those committed to the instrumental interest in social capital. If there are significant benefits in increasing the stock of social capital, then there must be significant costs associated with dwindling social capital.

Putnam draws his evidence for what he perceives as a process of progressive civic disengagement from a variety of sources. He notes that, since 1965, time devoted to participation in clubs and civic organisations has halved, and visiting and socialising has declined by more than 25 per cent. Political participation and membership of voluntary organisations have also declined, he claims, conjuring up images of forlorn lone bowlers engaged in private leisure.

It is Putnam’s view that America has recently witnessed the passing of a ‘ long civic generation’ born between 1910 and 1940. ‘The culmination point of this civic generation’, he says, ‘is the cohort born 1925-1930, who attended grade school during the Great Depression, spent World War II in high school (or on the battlefield), first voted in 1948 or 1952, set up housekeeping in the 1950s, and watched their first television when they were in their late twenties’.

He believes that ‘TV watching comes at the expense of nearly every social activity outside the home, especially social gatherings and informal conversations ... In short, television privatizes our leisure time’.

Television arrived later in Australia (1956), and it was the mid-1960s before it was in a majority of Australian households. The Australian television generation are those born after 1944. So will Australia experience a decline in its social capital in the coming decades with a consequent dwindling in the supply of volunteers?

Whatever the merits of Putnam’s argument about the privatising effects of TV watching, the changing age structure of the Australian population, and trends in the propensity to volunteer within various age groups, certainly do affect the supply of volunteers.

The ABS has published population projections for the next two decades based on information about fertility, mortality and net migration. Broadly speaking, these projections indicate that, during this time period, the proportion of the population aged less than 45 will decline, and of those aged 55 years and over will increase. The proportion of those aged 55 to 64 years will increase by 43 per cent, while those aged 65 years or more outstrip this increase by a weighty 52 per cent.

It is precisely among people at this stage in the life course that the propensity to volunteer is highest and that the average hours of voluntary work are greatest. This suggests that, if the propensity to volunteer remains constant, both the number of volunteers and the hours of voluntary work that these people supply are likely to increase to 2021.

Putnam’s thesis of civic disengagement predicts that the propensity to volunteer will decline with successive generations. In his view, earlier cohorts (born circa 1932 and 1942) belong to the civic generation, and later ones (those born circa 1952 and 1962 and raised on television) belong to the generation supposedly disengaging from civic participation.

But information from the ABS says otherwise. For more than a decade, the ABS has collected information on how people spend their days. Contrary to Putnam’s expectation, each successive birth cohort appears to have a higher rate of volunteering than the earlier ones.

Most crucially, the rate of volunteering among the allegedly disengaged post-war generation is higher than among their allegedly more civic predecessors. While there is some evidence that the coincidence of work and family pressure on women in their middle years has led to a reduction in the average hours of voluntary work they can supply to the community, the overall effect of this trend is small. It is not large enough to cancel out the substantial rises in volunteering due to increases related to the aging of the population.

Some tentative conclusions

If we accept that volunteering helps to build social capital, then these projections about a significant increase in the future supply of the number of volunteer hours give us reason to feel hopeful about the state of health of Australian democracy in the future.

For those who choose freely to give their time and labour to those in need, there is a readiness to extend to people they do not know the principles of sociable relating which would otherwise be experienced only within mutually pleasing personal relationships.

At the heart of this show of civility is the promise that the positive experiences of companionship and the bonds of mutual regard can be transformed into forms of civic engagement. This is why volunteering is such a rich source of institutional renewal – because it has the potential to build friendly alliances and forge bonds well beyond the private sphere of kin and personal companions, thereby bringing sociability to the realm of public interaction.

The question we wish to raise at this point, though, is whether this capacity for civility is the only thing volunteering can offer democracy? There is more at stake in the volunteering experience than a sense of delivering and receiving fair treatment from strangers.

Rather, what counts here is the capacity for compassion, kindness and caring. In bringing these qualities into the public domain, volunteers are showing us that civility can also mean caring for ‘generalised others’, thereby showing us democracy’s more human face.