Building civic capacity through enterprise: Self-employment’s association with who volunteers—and how much

Abstract

Guided by the civic voluntarism model, we argue that self-employment aligns with participation channels—resources/capacity via temporal autonomy and recruitment/opportunity via local embeddedness—yielding domain-specific patterns of civic engagement. Using the 2017 CPS Civic Engagement and Volunteering Supplement and propensity score matching with design-consistent inference, we examine whether self-employment is associated with different volunteering behaviors than wage and salary work. Associations concentrate on two margins: higher participation in civic/political and sports/recreation activities, and greater intensity among participants in health-related and religious activities. Scope conditions are consistent with the mechanisms: the association with environmental volunteering is stronger at older ages, and the association with sports/recreation volunteering is stronger among women. The key insight is that self-employment aligns with CVM channels—through temporal autonomy and local embeddedness—yielding greater entry where daytime coordination matters and greater sustained involvement where reputational ties bind; all estimates are interpreted as associations, not causal effects.