De kerk: een blijvende bron van sociaal kapitaal?

Het effect van secularisatie en onderwijsexpansie op niet-religieus vrijwilligerswerk in Nederland tussen 1988 en 2006

Samenvatting

During the last three decades church membership and church attendance have dropped significantly in the Netherlands. Over this period, however, the proportion of the Dutch population volunteering for a non-religious organization decreased at a much slower pace. A rather paradoxical situation given the strong association between religious involvement and volunteering. In this article we try to account for this apparent paradox by addressing the following question: Why has massive and ongoing religious disaffiliation in the Netherlands not resulted in a similar drop of the relative number of volunteers in non-religious voluntary associations? In view of this question, we propose that the negative effect of secularization on volunteering has been counteracted by a positive effect of educational expansion. We test this hypothesis with the help of longitudinal data by looking for possible changes in the behavior of specific groups, i.e. church members and higher educated people volunteering more, and for changes in the composition of the population, i.e. an increase in higher educated volunteers compensates for the loss of volunteering church members. Our findings indeed show, that secularization results in a drop of the relative number of volunteers and that this negative effect is counteracted by a positive effect of educational expansion. However, our findings also show that the opposite effects of secularization and educational expansion on non-religious volunteering are weak, since both church members and higher educated gradually volunteer less over time.