Unemployment and other forms of social exclusion: job loss and its consequences on civic engagement in Germany and Great Britain

Abstract

"This article addresses the relationship between unemployment and other forms of social exclusion. More specifically, it deals with the consequences of job loss on the participation in civic engagement, comparing the situation in Germany and Great Britain. Building on previous research which has shown that the unemployed are less engaged in volunteer work, the study investigates whether the decline of civic engagement is really a consequence of unemployment in the sense that people who lose their jobs give up their civic engagement. Special attention is given to the logic of the situation in which an unemployed person decides to give up or take up volunteering activities: Firstly, I argue that the use of volunteering as a job search strategy is related to early phases of unemployment while it is used as an alternative to paid employment in later stages of unemployment. Secondly, the article tests the assumption uttered by feminist authors that women are more inclined to accept unpaid volunteer work as a valuable alternative to paid employment. Thirdly, the study shows that the effect of job loss on volunteering behaviour cannot be understood independently from the institutional surrounding, namely the degree of labour market regulation in a country. The article presents empirical findings from the multivariate analysis of longitudinal panel data in Germany (GSOEP) and Great Britain (BHPS)." (author's abstract)