Civic Involvement in Deprived Communities: A Longitudinal Study in the United Kingdom

This study aims to understand how community material deprivation affects civic involvement amongst its residents. We posit that, beside individual characteristics and willingness to engage, contemporaneous experiences of neigbourhood deprivation may have complex effects on how much people devote time and energies to associational membership. We identify three mechanisms through which community deprivation can affect individual participation in political, civic, and work voluntary associations: social cohering, norms of civic duty, and coping with dissatisfaction. We link individual panel data from Understanding Society from 2009 to 2017 Index of Multiple Deprivation at neighbourhood level from the Office of National Statistics. Our empirical findings suggest that, overall, contemporaneous experiences of deprivation in the local area where people live tend to have a direct and indirect negative effect on associationism. This community effect is independent from an individual’s household economic resources. One of the main findings of the paper is that local deprivation disincentives individuals to join and gain access to the important resources of civic involvement.