This paper deals with the question: To what extent do individual religious characteristics, in addition to collective religious characteristics, contribute to the explanation of formal and informal volunteering in the Netherlands at the beginning of the 21st century? To answer this research question, we used the SOCON 2005–2006 dataset. Our main finding concerns informal volunteering: we found that spirituality increases the likelihood of informal volunteering, implying that openness to other people’s needs increases the likelihood of the actual provision of help. There are no other aspects of religiosity that are related to informal volunteering. With regard to formal volunteering we found that, in line with previous research, religious attendance is related positively to formal volunteering, religious as well as secular volunteering, which can be regarded as support for the proposition that religious involvement is important for norm conformity. Further, having a more religious worldview decreases the likelihood of formal volunteering which might show that those with a strong religious worldview are more concerned with the ‘otherworldly’ and less so with what they do in this world. We found no influence of individual religious characteristics on formal volunteering. These results confirm the idea that integration into a religious community plays quite a large role in explaining formal volunteering. Informal volunteering, however, seems to be independent of social networks: it rather depends on individual motivation.

Research on volunteering has emphasized the positive role played by individual religiosity on this type of civic engagement. There are fewer studies on the relation between contextual religiosity and volunteer work. Several of them have concluded that the higher the macro-contextual religiosity, the higher the propensity to get involved in volunteering. Thereby, researchers might be inclined to conclude that secularization is a threat to this social participation. This article shows that such a conclusion is unfounded. From a data set including the 27 countries of the European Union and using a multilevel analysis to control for the compositional effects of the national sample, we obtain a negative correlation between macro-contextual religiosity and volunteering. From these results, we suggest that the relationship between volunteering and contextual religiosity cannot be considered as deterministic but it has to be comprehended in a more global cultural context.

This article analyzes the role of three antecedents of life satisfaction (LS) among healthcare volunteers in Malaysia. The antecedents are: personality traits, motives to volunteer, and spiritual capital. This study has empirically tested the impact of individual dimensions of personality traits, motives, and spiritual capital along with their inter-relationships in explaining the LS. The volunteers of St. John Ambulance participated in this study. The model has been tested using structural equation modeling and it has been found that the three constructs have an explanatory power of 53 %. The main results are: (1) neuroticism, value motives, protective motives, personal well-being, and spirituality have a direct impact on LS and (2) enhancement motives, social motives, and religiosity have an indirect impact on LS. These results can provide insights to researchers and managers regarding profiling the right volunteers, providing the necessary infrastructure, and providing proper training to the volunteers.

Recognition of the multi-cultural nature of the Canadian population has led companies across a wide array of business domains to reach beyond their traditional bases of support to focus on hitherto untapped communities as potential markets for their goods and services. Competitive conditions within the voluntary sector have pushed nonprofits along this same path. However, no systematic Canadian research reports on the attitudes, social norms, benefits sought, expectations, opportunities, experiences, or behaviors of sub-communities in the voluntary sector. This paper examines philanthropic behavior by religion using data from the Statistics Canada 2000 National Survey of Giving, Volunteering and Participating. The paper compares and contrasts the voluntary and philanthropic behaviors of the Canadian population across religious groups; compares and contrasts the motivations for and perceived impediments against such behaviors; and articulates and examines a model that traces the influence of religion on voluntary and philanthropic behavior in Canada’s multi-cultural society.

Individual motivation is the core of the actualization and continuity in voluntary work from both the standpoint of theoretical research and practical volunteerism. Volunteer motivation also provides an excellent research area for investigating the wider sociological theme of late-modern participation. This study, based on the data from 18 interviews, explores volunteer motivation utilizing a phenomenological approach to individual experience and the meaning of volunteerism. Using a phenomenological approach illuminates the nature of volunteer motivation more holistically. The research includes 767 motivational elements in 47 themes and develops an innovative four-dimensional octagon model of volunteer motivation—the theoretical and practical applications of which are discussed.

We examine the relationship between likelihood to volunteer and a range of human capital, social capital, religious capital and ubuntu variables in South Africa seven years after the official end of apartheid. Using the 2001 World Values Survey we find that education is positively associated with volunteering, but employment has a negative association with volunteering when including controls for wealth and income. Religiosity has a strong positive association with volunteering and a broad base, cutting across the socio-economic and racial divides. This suggest that religious congregations in collaboration with other sectors could be a vehicle to increase access to volunteer opportunities for those who lack the status to take part in other volunteering activities.

This study analyzes Turkey’s political landscape by harnessing computational social science techniques to parse extensive data about public ideologies from the Politus database. Unlike existing theoretical frameworks that focus on the ideologies of political elites and cadres, this study examines public ideologies in a contentious political manner. Exploiting an artificial intelligence-based data generation pipeline on digital traces, it distills the eight most prevalent ideologies down to the city level and employs exploratory statistical analyses. Principal component analysis delineates two fundamental axes: the traditional left–right political spectrum and a separate spectrum of secular–religious inclination, encompassing both political and cultural dimensions. Then, cluster analysis reveals three distinct groups: left-leaning and religiously inclined; center-right-leaning and religiously inclined; and those with a center-right-leaning focus and a pronounced secular orientation. The outcomes provide valuable insights into the political and cultural axes within political society, offering a clearer understanding of the most recent ideological and political climate in Turkey.

Research on whether religiosity promotes or reduces prejudice has produced plenty of paradoxical findings. In this article, we address the relationship between religiosity and anti-diversity attitudes (xenophobia and homophobia) among Christians in Western Germany. We ask what the relationship between religiosity and anti-diversity attitudes is and how it can be explained. Two (complementary) theoretical explanations are presented: the religious-ideology explanation emphasizes the role of fundamentalism, and the loss-of-privileges explanation underscores the importance of perceived disadvantage. Our analysis is based on a representative sample of Christians in Western Germany and provides evidence of a curvilinear religiosity–prejudice relationship. Up to a certain level of religiosity, xenophobia and homophobia decrease as religiosity increases; however, the relationship then reverses—anti-diversity attitudes are particularly pronounced among the highly religious. The level of xenophobia among the highly religious is fully explained by fundamentalism and perceived disadvantage, whereas their level of homophobia is only partially explained.

Existing research suggests a negative correlation between reflective thinking and religious belief. The dual process model (DPM) posits that reflection diminishes religious belief by limiting intuitive decisions. In contrast, the expressive rationality model (ERM) argues that reflection serves an identity-protective function by bolstering rather than modifying preexisting beliefs. Although the current literature tends to favor the DPM, many studies suffer from unbalanced samples. To avoid this limitation, we recruited comparably large number of participants for both religious believers (n = 580) and non-believers (n = 594) and observed the relationship between reflection and two measures of religious belief: belief in God and disbelief in evolution. Our findings corroborate the negative associations found between higher levels of reflection and both types of belief, independent of religious affiliation. Our results align with the broader literature, supporting the DPM but not the ERM.

We study the effect of an immigration ban on the self-selection of immigrants along cultural traits, and the transmission of these traits to the second generation. We show theoretically that restricting immigration incentivizes to settle abroad individuals with higher attachment to their origin culture, who, under free mobility, would rather choose circular migration. Once abroad, these individuals tend to convey their cultural traits to their children. As a consequence, restrictive immigration policies can foster the diffusion of cultural traits across boundaries and generations. We focus on religiosity, which is one of the most persistent and distinctive cultural traits, and exploit the 1973 immigration ban in West Germany (Anwerbestopp) as a natural experiment. Through a diff-in-diff analysis, we find that second generations born to parents treated by the Anwerbestopp show higher religiosity.

Economic studies of religion tend to focus on religious affiliation and attendance at religious services to the exclusion of other dimensions of religion, including religious belief. We address this lacuna, using data from the World Values Survey to construct an index of religious beliefs based on whether an individual believes in God, heaven, hell, an immortal soul, and the afterlife. Following the approach in a seminal article, we compare the roles of religious beliefs and attendance in determining economic values related to cooperation, patriarchy, institutional trust, lawfulness, thrift, markets, and market fairness. Controlling for denominational, country and period fixed effects and a set of individual-level characteristics, we find that religious beliefs matter for six of these seven values, relative to five for attendance. In addition, beliefs are more important than attendance for promarket and patriarchal values and less important for thrift, market fairness, lawfulness, and institutional trust. We also consider the relationships between beliefs, attendance, and economic values for eight religious’ affiliations: Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, other religions, and non-religious. Taken together, beliefs and attendance are most important for patriarchal values, promarket attitudes, lawfulness, and institutional trust. Relative to attendance, beliefs matter most for patriarchal attitudes and least for institutional trust. Our results suggest that religious beliefs constitute an important dimension of religious life. An exclusive focus on attendance may understate the role of religion in economic values.