The politics of volunteer involvement: historical institutional pathways, critical junctures, and contemporary events affecting volunteering in Austria, Lithuania, Portugal, and Slovakia

ENThis article adopts the term popular engagement from Evers/von Essen (2019) to consider volunteer involvement across a spectrum of activities from volunteering to civic action. It uses a historical institutional perspective to understand how popular engagement in Austria, Lithuania, Portugal, and Slovakia spans the political and civic/public spheres and represents contested and consensual public opinions. It highlights that political processes and societal events can perpetuate popular engagement’s evolutionary path or function as critical branching points. One example is the European Year of Volunteering (EYV 2011), which, particularly in Lithuania, changed the trajectory of national volunteering policy and its institutionalisation with new frameworks for volunteering and clearer ownership of the volunteering agenda. The key questions addressed are how historical legacies and institutional traditions shape civil society, what key moments or events, such as war and democratisation, EYV 2011, and humanitarian crises, have triggered shifts in the institutionalised path, and how political institutions responded. Overall, even when facing similar critical junctures, they have not reacted similarly because of the unique origins of each civil society and the contemporary relationship with the state. The concluding section outlines volunteering and political trends in each country and suggests future research. Keywords: Civic Action, Critical Junctures, Democratic Participation, European Year of Volunteering 2011, Historical Institutional Theory, Volunteering, Path-Dependency: Popular Engagement.

• Politikos mokslai / Political sciences
• Sociologija / Sociology