The previous chapter has illustrated that current studies may be able to explain why certain types of individuals volunteer at different rates but are inadequate for explaining why similar communities volunteer at different rates. In order to develop a better explanation of variation in volunteer participation at the community level, this chapter seeks to illuminate the factors that generate high rates of volunteer participation in some communities and lower rates in others. In the following pages, I closely examine volunteer participation in the delivery of two services, firefighting and eldercare, in which both volunteers as well as paid city employees provide services. I gathered documentation and talked with city officials and volunteers in Kashihara, Sakata, and Sanda, three medium-size cities in Japan.

The cities were selected as “most similar” cities – they all have populations of approximately the same size – but they also had experienced very different growth rates in their numbers of volunteer firefighters (the only volunteer organization for which I could obtain municipal-level data prior to fieldwork in the city) in the past ten years. Sanda experienced the largest population increase among cities with populations of approximately 100,000 people (it doubled between 1989 and 1999), but at the same time the numbers of its volunteer firefighters remained constant. Kashihara and Sakata had stable populations throughout the ten-year period, but among cities whose populations were approximately 100,000 in 2000, Sakata experienced the largest decrease in its number of volunteer firefighters (–31 percent), while Kashihara had the largest growth rate (+79 percent).