How perceived income inequality affects charitable giving and volunteering: assessing four mechanisms

Public concerns about economic inequality are large and growing, and they have been shown to affect people's charitable giving and volunteering. While empirical literature addresses this issue, it provides little evidence on the underlying mechanisms linking inequality and civic engagement. Scholars from different disciplines have proposed numerous hypotheses about these mechanisms, with the social disintegration, conflict, relative power, and unmet needs hypotheses among the most frequently suggested. In this study, we apply mediation analysis to survey data from Austria and Germany (N = 1,691) to assess which of these mechanisms help explain the relationship. Our results support the social disintegration and unmet needs hypotheses: individuals who completely agree that income inequality is too high are slightly less likely to give to charity (volunteer) due to the indirect relationship through generalised social trust and substantially more likely to give to charity (volunteer) due to the indirect relationship through impure altruism compared to those who completely disagree that income inequality is too high. These findings imply that multiple mechanisms work in opposing directions. Our study provides an important step in theory development in this field and serves as a basis for future experimental studies.