Volunteering, social participation and democracy – the heart of matter

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.