Why do some communities have higher rates of volunteering than others? This question is one of the central concerns of this book. In the previous chapter, I explored why people in various places might volunteer for different types of organizations. I showed how citizen attitudes toward governmental and social responsibility for dealing with social problems explain why some places have more of certain types of volunteer organizations and fewer of others.

Explaining differences in types of volunteering does not, however, explain variation in rates of volunteering from one place to another. Why might one city have very high levels of volunteering, whereas another city with similar demographic characteristics has much lower volunteer participation rates? In this chapter, I investigate how well conventional explanations for variation in volunteering rates can explain volunteer participation in Japan.

TESTING CONVENTIONAL EXPLANATIONS FOR VOLUNTEERING RATES

Recent studies of civic engagement in the United States have generated valuable tools for predicting which individuals will volunteer and how much. For example, we now have a better understanding of why a college-educated suburbanite would be more likely to volunteer than an inner-city high school dropout. However, these studies do not help us understand why one community has much higher rates of volunteerism than another community with similar demographic characteristics. Because most scholars, governments, and activists are interested in building healthy, civically engaged communities, not necessarily changing an individual's psychology or propensity to volunteer, we need to look at volunteering as more of a collective activity than an individual one.