The Role of Voluntary Organizations in Building Trust

Abstract

Voluntary organizations are crucial in promoting generalized social trust in a society. The aim of this study is thus to investigate the relationship between the generalized social trust and membership in voluntary organizations. We employ the World Values Survey data for 48 countries including Turkiye on trust and organizational membership for the years 2017-2020 (Wave 7). In addition to the overall organizational membership, this study also investigates the nexus between trust and membership in large numbers of voluntary organizations such as "sport or recreational organization, political party, art, music or educational organization, professional association, humanitarian or charitable organization, religious organization, consumer organization, selfhelp group, mutual aid group". Our logistic regression estimates show that all of these membership variables are significantly related with the trust variable for the full sample. Thus, our results provide substantial evidence for the argument that membership in voluntary organizations is an important factor in building trust in a society. Our further estimations also imply that the positive association between organizational membership and trust holds regardless of the being active or inactive member. However, unlike the full sample, our results for Turkiye show that while overall organizational membership fails to raise trust, memberships to some voluntary organizations such as labor union, political party and aid organizations have even negative association with trust in Turkiye.