Background and problem

The voluntary sector consists of a multitude of organizations and associations. They have different purposes, different activities, and various target groups. They vary in size, membership base, ideology, and political orientation. Some take care of their own members ’ interests, while others act to help other people in need. Under the heading of ‘voluntary ’ we include everything from the local church choir, Greenpeace, political parties, unions, hunters ’ association, nursing homes, to homeless shelters, football clubs and so on. In other words, we all have a good sense of the heterogeneity of the sector, and the sector itself often pay tribute to this fact. It is quite obvious that there must be a variety of reasons why people volunteer for these different organizations. Still, it seems that we tend to think that different types of volunteering can be explained by the same set of mechanisms and social theories. Hence, few analyses of determinants of volunteering try to break down the dependent variable into different types (Janoski and Wilson 1995; Grønbjerg and Never 2004). In many cases this is probably also due to a lack of sufficient data and statistical power. In this paper we rely on a comprehensive population survey carried out as part of the Danish John