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Rising socio-economic inequality in many countries raises the question of how it affects individuals' civic engagement in the forms of charitable giving, volunteering and non-profit membership. Though a growing body of multidisciplinary literature has started to address this issue, empirical results vary considerably and explanations about what underlies this relationship remain fragmentary. We thus conduct a systematic literature review to (a) provide a synopsis of empirical findings and (b) identify theoretical explanations and presumed mediating mechanisms underlying this relationship. Reviewing 70 studies, we find that higher inequality is most often negatively related to civic engagement, and that this relation is moderated by individual factors, for example, income and education. Furthermore, we map the proposed theoretical explanations into five key approaches. For each of these, we trace and identify the underlying mechanisms at both the societal and the individual level, and provide a conceptual framework that facilitates their empirical analysis in future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Corporate volunteering (CV) is an increasingly common type of nonprofit-business collaboration and can take various forms, and its benefits for the business partner are well studied. The benefits for the nonprofit partner, however, are less evident and often questioned. This study investigates why nonprofits engage in and how they make sense of CV collaborations, building on the concepts of sensemaking and cognitive frames. Drawing on interviews with staff in nonprofit organizations, we reveal that decisions about CV collaborations usually go beyond the resources acquired through CV itself. We identify three different CV frames and show how they lead to different types of partnerships, hereby challenging the assumption that more integrative partnerships are superior to philanthropic ones. Our results show that depending on the frame used, different perceptions of the distribution of power between the nonprofit and the business partner exist, addressing the crucial role of how nonprofit organizations position themselves in such partnerships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Previous research addressing the relation between income and donations as a proportion of income has revealed predominantly inconsistent results. In this article, we argue that this can partly be explained by the great variance of methodological approaches. Providing a literature review covering 26 studies, we systematically identify how methodological issues such as data, variables, and methods have affected former findings. In addition, we apply different methodological approaches to Austrian income tax data (n = 20,000), demonstrating how different methods lead to a variation in results. Overall, we show that existing studies are hardly comparable as their designs vary strongly. We point out that it is particularly important to use samples with sufficient cases of all income groups and methods that adequately account for the non-linear relation between the two variables, not restricting it to a U-shape. Our findings enable a better understanding and interpretation of diverging findings in philanthropic research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the literature it is generally assumed that activities of voluntary membership based associations operating in stable institutional environments are multi-faceted, contributing simultaneously to societal, economic and political spheres. This article, drawing on the concept of functions of non-profit organizations investigates, whether the multi-functional character of associations holds true in the context of transitional Russia. The paper examines the relative importance of the advocacy, community building and service delivery functions, fulfilled by different types of associations. The original empirical data from exploratory interviews with 15 leading experts on associational activities was triangulated by a confirmatory survey of 215 associations across Russia. The results confirm that the absolute majority of the examined associations are multifunctional. Advocacy is considered to be the most important function for all types of associations. The findings suggest that business associations and intermediary unions are more active in policy advocacy directed toward the government, while liberal professional societies are more engaged in public advocacy addressing society at large. This study highlights importance of domestic associations for countries in transition as an institutional infrastructure of organized civil society, democratic development and market economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to contribute to the long-standing discussion about nonprofit organizations’ (NPOs) dependence on public funding and its consequences on their advocacy role in modern societies. Drawing on resource dependence theory and data from a quantitative survey, the study investigates the impact of public funding and its extent on nonprofit engagement in advocacy. Traditionally, scholars have cautioned that NPOs reliant on public sources will hesitate to pursue political objectives and to engage in advocacy work. Yet, empirical findings are strikingly inconsistent. One of the reasons for these ambiguous findings may be the way advocacy is measured. To address this issue, we apply two different approaches to evaluate NPO engagement. Both sets of findings from our multivariate analyses of Austrian NPOs suggest that public funding does not have a negative impact on advocacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines inequalities in the spatial accessibility of childcare between high- and low-status neighbourhoods in the city of Vienna and asks (i) whether specific public and non-profit provider types contribute to these inequalities and (ii) which factors may cause these inequalities in a mainly tax-funded childcare system. For our analysis, we combine data on the location and characteristics of childcare providers with spatially granular information on demand and neighbourhood characteristics. The results show that two provider types – church-related and independent non-profit providers – are mainly responsible for the higher accessibility of childcare in neighbourhoods with higher socio-economic status. Specifically independent providers charge significantly higher prices and offer more special services in these high-status areas. Public funding of a large part of the production costs, therefore, seems insufficient to ensure equal access in all neighbourhoods. These findings suggest that the exclusive comparison between public, private non-profit and private for-profit providers often found in the literature may be too narrow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]