Abstract
The global COVID-19 health pandemic has put extraordinary pressure on already fiscally strapped local governments. As local jurisdictions search for strategies to meet rising service expectations with declining resources, use of volunteers would seem to offer significant advantages. This study examines the involvement of volunteers to deliver services in all county governments in one U.S. state, as well as the factors that explain the extent of use of this service approach. Our analysis is based on information collected from a survey of county government officials working in 10 service domains, supplemented by demographic and other data drawn from a variety of sources. To arrive at valid estimates of volunteer involvement in the delivery of county services, we introduce a novel methodology that corrects our survey data for possible sample and response biases based on a calibration estimator using auxiliary information. The results of our inquiry reveal a higher use of volunteers to deliver services by county governments than suggested by the literature. The findings show, moreover, that counties with higher per capita income, greater percentage of residents attaining a bachelor’s degree or higher formal education, and lower unemployment are likely to involve volunteers in the delivery of more services, as are those county governments with greater per capita spending and per capita property tax revenues. These results have important implications in regard to the capacity of local governments to use volunteers, which we treat in the Discussion.
Since the late 1970s, struggling with fiscal stress has been the “new normal” in public administration. In the 2010s, U.S. local governments came under fiscal stress brought about by the “the twin pressures” of the Great Recession combined with devolution, that is, decreases in aid from higher levels of government and increasing local responsibilities (Kim, 2018, p. 44). Mohr and colleagues (2010, p. 894) find that at the same time they must deal with economic downturn and maintain service levels and meet additional service demands, Local governments also face long-term declines in state and federal support and resistance to expanding traditional revenue sources such as property taxes or exploring new revenue sources such as user fees and charges. These governments feel pressure to find more efficient ways to produce necessary services.
One might have thought that after more than 40 years of dealing with fiscal stress, little possible could be new about it, and the normality of coping would have become routine. However, the global health pandemic stemming from COVID-19, which began in 2020 and continues at this writing, threatens both assumptions. “The unprecedented double blow of the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing steep recession challenges local governments in profound ways,” write Benton and colleagues (2020, p. 28). Based on in-depth interviews with 30 local officials, their study (Benton et al., 2020, p. 31) reveals a very demanding and complicated situation for government officials at all levels (but particularly city and county officials) who are constantly on the frontlines and must simultaneously balance the need to provide a large number of vital and desirable services, insure the safety and health of their citizens, protect the interests of businesses, keep down the cost of government operations while practicing efficiencies and guaranteeing program effectiveness operations, interact with other levels of government, and plan for the future of their community.
As local governments struggle yet again to combat heightened fiscal stringency, one response that has attracted considerable attention and application from practitioners as well as scholars in the past is the use of Alternative Service Delivery (ASD) arrangements to deliver public services. Kim and Warner (2016) observe, “Local governments often turn to alternative service delivery as a means to address fiscal stress” (p. 791). Other research is more emphatic: “In the absence of assistance from higher levels of governments . . . alternative service delivery may be one of few ways local governments can maintain services” (Kim, 2018, p. 45).
Although most research in this area centers on government contracting out for the delivery of services, ASD arrangements encompass a much broader array of service approaches. Scholars recognize a wide range of alternative arrangements, including in-house public delivery, intergovernmental cooperation, contracting-out to for-profit and/or nonprofit providers, franchises/concessions, subsidies, and volunteers (Bel et al., 2013; Brown & Potoski, 2006; Hefetz & Warner, 2012; ICMA, 2012, 2017a; Mohr et al., 2010; Warner & Hebdon, 2001). Our study focuses on the use of one of these modalities by local governments to continue and bolster service delivery: volunteers (Alford, 1998; Brudney, 1984, 1993; Ferris, 1988; ICMA, 2012, 2017a; Kang, 2020; Musso et al., 2019; Nesbit & Brudney, 2013).
In the midst of a health pandemic and financial insecurity, volunteer involvement in the delivery of services would seem to offer distinct advantages to local governments, including gains in cost-efficiency, flexibility, and human resources, especially by comparison to other ASD arrangements. Given these advantages, in this study we ask, first, to what extent have U.S. local governments involved volunteers in the delivery of services? Second, is volunteer involvement found universally across local governments, or is application more prevalent in some jurisdictions rather than others? Inquiry regarding this last question can help us to understand possible bounds on implementation—and what policymakers might do to surmount them.
To investigate these questions, we identified and surveyed the heads of the 10 government departments most likely to involve volunteers in the delivery of services in each of the counties in a single state, North Carolina. The results of our survey suggest that the use of volunteers to assist in the delivery of services by local governments is much greater than intimated by the extant literature, thus suggesting a relatively high take-up rate that might be readily extended to other jurisdictions: Nearly half of the sample of county government officials report that their department involves volunteers in the delivery of services, and in some service domains such as education and social services, application is even higher. Yet, our findings also reveal that implementation is not uniform but skewed toward certain jurisdictions: Counties with higher per capita income, greater percentage of residents attaining a bachelor’s degree or higher formal education, and lower unemployment are likely to involve volunteers in the delivery of more services, as are those county governments with greater per capita spending and per capita property tax revenues. These findings raise serious implications for potential adoption and use by local governments lacking the resources to deal with the “newest normal” of fiscal austerity in the midst of a health pandemic.
We begin by reviewing the literature on volunteer use in the delivery of services by local governments in the United States. We then examine the scant research that has endeavored to explain volunteer involvement and the key factors thought to affect adoption of this ASD approach by cities and counties. Following, we elaborate our survey methodology, sample, and analytic methods, which include techniques to adjust for selection and response biases in our study to provide more valid estimates of volunteer involvement. Although our findings emanate from a single state, we elaborate a useful statistical methodology for assessing volunteer involvement that can inform future inquiry by correcting for possible biases, which has not been applied in prior research. After presenting the findings, we turn to a discussion of the results and their implications, especially as they concern the resource base needed to involve volunteers in the delivery of local government services.
Volunteer Involvement in Service Delivery in U.S. Local Governments
Scholars began systematic assessment of volunteer involvement as an ASD approach among U.S. local governments in the 1980s. Based on analysis of studies from that era, Brudney (1990) found that “at all levels of government, volunteers are prevalent in the delivery of services” (p. 4). Examining the results of the 1982 and 1988 International City/County Management Association (ICMA) surveys of Alternative Service Delivery approaches, Morley (1989) described use of volunteers as “well entrenched” as a service delivery option for local governments and forecasted “continuation or potential growth in the future” (p. 44). Brudney (1990) anticipated that the forces that drove volunteer involvement in government, including rising fiscal stringency, greater openness to alternative service-delivery approaches, and warming relationships toward citizen participation, “are likely to continue, and with them, the significance of the volunteer option in the public sector” (p. 7).
In contradistinction to this optimistic forecast, however—and despite the need and search for additional resources by local governments—available data and literature suggest that volunteer use by these entities has not appeared to rise as predicted in the 1990s and beyond. This trend seems anomalous, as volunteers would likely make good friends to local governments, for example, through enhancing their ability to achieve cost-savings, expand organizational capacity, and extend service reach (Hager & Brudney, 2004). At the same time, Presidential administrations as well as state and local government leaders have fervently endorsed voluntary initiatives in local communities (Brudney, 1999).
Yet, the ICMA Surveys have documented apparent declines in the reported use of volunteers by local governments to assist in the delivery of services in the 1990s and into the 2000s. The 1992 ICMA Alternative Service Delivery survey showed “surprisingly, that local government use of volunteers, particularly in cultural and arts programming and in programs for the elderly, had declined relative to 1982 levels” (Nesbit & Brudney, 2013, p. 32). Reporting on the results of the 1992 ASD, Miranda and Andersen (1994) observed, “while use of volunteers is likely to continue, a downward trend is apparent. Significant decreases in the use of volunteers have occurred in almost all service areas reported on by survey respondents” (p. 33). Morley (1999) confirmed, although local government use of volunteers remained relatively stable in the 1992 and 1997 surveys, the downward trend revealed by the 1992 survey continued, with “some fairly substantial decreases in the use of volunteers between 1988 and 1997” (p. 40). In the service domains in which volunteers were used, fewer than 1% of governments reported their use in many of these services (Nesbit & Brudney, 2013, p. 32).
The downward trend observed in the 1990s continued into the early 2000s. Nesbit and Brudney (2013) analyzed responses to the ICMA surveys of U.S. local governments concerning alternative service delivery approaches administered in 2002 and 2007. Their analysis showed that in 2002, volunteers, together with franchises and subsidies, were the least common approaches to service delivery, collectively accounting for less than 4% of local government service delivery overall. The results of the 2007 ICMA survey “suggest further declines in local government use of volunteers” (Nesbit and Brudney, 2013, p. 32). Nesbit and Brudney (2013, p. 39) found that “since the 1990s, local governments have been making rather limited use of volunteers,” although they moderated this conclusion somewhat by noting that population size, region of the United States, and type of government may affect the level of volunteer involvement.
We analyzed the aggregated responses to the most recent ICMA (2012, 2017a) Alternative Service Delivery surveys of local governments administered in 2012 and 2017, publicly available on the ICMA website. Of the total of 76 services assessed in the 2012 survey, the single largest group—31 services, or 40.79% (mode = 0)—showed no involvement of volunteers by local governments, and for more than half of the services, less than 1% of local governments involved volunteers (56.58% services, median = 1). The results regarding volunteer use in 2017 were nearly identical, if even a bit lower. Of the total of 74 services assessed by ICMA in the later survey, nearly half—34 services, or 45.95% (mode = 0)—showed no involvement of volunteers, and for nearly six in 10, less than 1% of local governments involved volunteers (58.11% services, median = 1). ICMA (2017b) reports that on average in the 2017 ASD Survey, across all local government services 3% are provided by volunteers.
Choudhury (2010) observes that although citizens volunteer to public agencies at all levels of government, they “are yet to earn the status of an asset” (p. 593). Our analysis of the 2012 and 2017 ICMA Alternative Service Delivery surveys as well as the ICMA 2017 Summary Report confirm the trend of a low level of volunteer involvement in service delivery by local governments since the 1990s. The reasons for the apparent decline in recourse to volunteers are not apparent, as over the past 30 years local governments in the United States, and around the globe, have been challenged—and creative—in finding alternative ways to deliver services to meet rising popular needs amid fiscal austerity (Kim, 2018; Kim & Warner, 2016; Mohr et al., 2010). These forces have led local governments to seek and develop alternative approaches to assist in the delivery of services. Scholars such as Salamon (2003) document increased collaboration between government and nonprofits in complex service-delivery arrangements; 10% of local government services on average were provided by nonprofit organizations according to the 2017 ASD Survey (ICMA, 2017b). In addition, public administration literature recognizes and elaborates a “contracting regime” across public, nonprofit, and for-profit organizations to provide services in the United States (e.g., Heinrich & Choi, 2007; Jolley, 2008). In the 2017 ASD Survey, an average of 20% of local government services were provided through the private sector and 28% through another government (ICMA, 2017b).
Thus, “a large majority of local governments also use intergovernmental contracting and private providers to deliver services (ICMA, 2017b).” However, volunteer use remains rather low. Perhaps the factors associated with the involvement of volunteers can help to provide an explanation. In the next section, we examine how scholars have attempted to explain volunteer use by U.S. local governments.
Explaining Volunteer Involvement in the Delivery of Services
Limited empirical research analyzes factors that may explain volunteer use by local governments in general (Ferris, 1988; Ivonchyk, 2019; Kang et al., in press; Nesbit & Brudney, 2013) or in individual service domains, for example, policing and law enforcement (Kang, 2019, 2020) and fire protection (Bice & Hoyt, 2000; Brudney & Duncombe, 1992; Brunet et al., 2001). In several studies, the demographic variables that researchers include to explain the level of volunteer involvement in local government services are used as control variables rather than as primary independent variables, to investigate other issues regarding volunteer use, such as the effectiveness of volunteer services (Kang, 2019), the costs and benefits of public sector volunteer programs (Ivonchyk, 2019), the choice between paid versus volunteer delivery of local government services (Brunet et al., 2001), and the associated costs (Brudney & Duncombe, 1992).
As might have been anticipated given the differences in samples, measurement, methodology, and purposes of these studies, they have not yielded consistent results with respect to an explanatory model of volunteer involvement in the delivery of services by local governments. Nevertheless, they provide essential guidance regarding the types of variables that should be taken into account in efforts to explain the use of volunteers in service delivery, and we therefore examine their effects in the present inquiry.
The literature evinces three categories of explanatory variables: sociodemographic characteristics, such as population, educational attainment, income, unemployment, owner-occupied housing, and urban status; county government-specific characteristics, such as public employment, tax expenditures and revenues, and fiscal stress; and political variables, such as the political orientation of the populace (Bice & Hoyt, 2000; Brudney & Duncombe, 1992; Brunet et al., 2001; Ferris, 1988; Ivonchyk, 2019; Kang, 2019, 2020; Kang et al., in press; Sundeen, 1988). Statistical studies attempting to explain why individuals volunteer either for local government (e.g., Sundeen, 1988) or more generally (e.g., Grimm & Dietz, 2018) likewise incorporate such explanatory variables. Recent research has begun to consider the possible effects of a fourth category of independent variables on volunteer involvement in local government service delivery: the presence of nonprofit organizations in a county (Kang et al., in press). The issue raised is whether the presence of nonprofits in a county may act as a model to encourage or “crowd in” greater use of volunteers by county governments or, alternatively, to “crowd out” volunteer involvement through competition for available volunteers.
Table 1 details the results of the multivariate empirical investigations (except for Nesbit & Brudney, 2013, which uses bivariate methods) aimed at explaining the factors associated with volunteer involvement in the delivery of local government services. The table reports two categories of explanatory variables, sociodemographic and government-specific characteristics, which are found to be statistically significant predictors of volunteer involvement (although not always consistently across studies). Empirical scholarship has only begun to examine political climate and nonprofit presence as predictors of volunteer involvement: Kang (2020) finds that political conservatism measured as percentage of citizens who voted Republican in the 2012 Presidential election is associated positively with the involvement of volunteer officers in law enforcement. Kang and colleagues (in press) investigate the effects of the number of registered nonprofits in a county, but their study does not find a statistical relationship between nonprofit presence and volunteer involvement in service delivery.
Summary of Previous Empirical Studies on Predictors of Volunteer Involvement in Local Government.
Note. Statistical relationship between the independent variable and the dependent variable is positive (denoted as “P” in parenthesis) or negative (denoted as “N” in parenthesis).
p < .10. **p < .05. ***p < .01.
As shown in Table 1, extant studies provide inconsistent results regarding the relationship between sociodemographic characteristics of a jurisdiction and volunteer involvement in the delivery of government services. With respect to population size, some studies report a positive association (Ferris, 1988; Nesbit & Brudney, 2013), whereas others report a negative association (Kang, 2020; Kang et al., in press). Educational attainment appears to have a negative association with volunteer involvement (Brunet et al., 2001; Kang, 2020). Findings are also inconsistent regarding the relationship between median housing value and volunteer involvement (Brunet et al., 2001; Ferris, 1988). Median household income has a negative association with volunteer involvement (Brunet et al., 2001; Kang, 2020; Kang et al., in press).
The empirically-based literature also reveals inconsistent findings with respect to the relationship between government-specific factors and volunteer involvement in service delivery. Fiscal stress faced by local governments, such as property tax limitations, have a negative association with volunteer involvement (Ferris, 1988), while local tax burden manifests a positive association (Ferris, 1988; Kang, 2020). With regard to revenue, a recent study demonstrates inconsistent results according to level of government: a negative association between total revenue and volunteer involvement in municipal government versus a positive association at the county level (Kang et al., press). Just one study reports on public services contracted out; Kang and colleagues (in press) find a positive association between percent of services contracted out and volunteer involvement. Finally, the literature shows mixed results with respect to the relationship between form of government and volunteer involvement (Ferris, 1988; Kang et al., in press; Nesbit & Brudney, 2013). Based on the research literature our model incorporates county sociodemographic characteristics, government features, political climate, and nonprofit presence.
Method
The data for our analysis emanate from a survey designed to assess volunteer involvement in public service delivery in all counties of North Carolina. North Carolina is a growing, populous state, which faces many of the same challenges as other states with respect to the need to deliver quality services in the face of budgetary constraints. We recognize that our findings are bound to a single U.S. state, but we believe that the design and methodology of our study provide more useful and accurate insights into contemporary estimates of volunteer involvement in major service areas in county governments, and ability to explain variation across them.
Our survey centered on the use of volunteers to assist in the delivery of services in county governments. Rather than soliciting an overall response from the county regarding volunteer involvement, however—which would be highly problematic given the range of services provided and the variability of volunteer use across them—within each county we surveyed officials in the top 10 service domains across U.S. local governments in which volunteers are most often found. Based on surveys and studies by the International City County Management Association reviewed above and other sources, we administered our online survey on volunteer use in each county to local government officials working in the following service domains, in which volunteers are most likely to be involved: Arts, culture, and museums; Education and schools; Fire, emergency management services, and ambulance; General administrative services; Human services, social services, aging services, and community development; Libraries; Natural resources, environment, and recycling; Parks and recreation; Public health/health department; and the Sheriff’s Department, corrections, and judicial. Because no enumeration of these administrators exists in North Carolina, much less a listing of volunteer programs in the State, we perused the county websites to identify appropriate respondents. Given our interest in these 10 service domains in each county, and a state with 100 counties, the sampling frame for this study consists of N = 1,000 local government administrators whose departments may enlist volunteers to assist in the delivery of services.
We developed a questionnaire to be administered online to these officials concerning volunteer involvement in their service domain or department (rather than in the county as a whole). Before disseminating the survey to this population, we obtained approval for research involving human subjects from the Office of Sponsored Programs and Research Compliance at our university. We conducted our survey in late 2016 and followed up two times with reminders to local government officials who had not returned the survey. The survey probed the areas of use (or nonuse) of volunteers, challenges of involving volunteers in public service delivery, benefits of having volunteers, management of volunteers, the ability (or failure) to sustain volunteer-based service delivery, and background information on responding local government administrators. In all, we received responses from 355 county officials for a cooperation rate of 35.5%. 1
Although our cooperation rate may be considered acceptable for an online survey that could offer no incentives and depended solely on the goodwill of the county government officials, we were concerned that it may elicit a response bias. To address possible response bias and obtain more accurate estimates of volunteer involvement in county government, we used the statistical procedures available in STATA to weight the observations, so that they would be more representative of the population of counties in North Carolina. To do so, we combined the data obtained from our online survey of government officials with county demographic and economic data available from the American Community Survey (ACS). With these combined data, we followed two steps. As a first step, we used the number of county government employees to calculate a baseline sampling weight. As a second step, we adjusted the sampling weight by using an auxiliary variable, county population. The weighted data derived from the two steps enable us to provide more reliable information about the incidence of volunteer involvement in service delivery by county governments, and to explain its occurrence. We elaborate the two-step procedure further in the Findings section below.
Table 2 presents the source and descriptive statistics for all variables used in our analysis. These data comprise county sociodemographic characteristics, including population, educational attainment (percentage of bachelor’s degrees or higher), per capita income, unemployment rate, percent owner-occupied housing, and urban (metro) status; county government characteristics, including per capita government expenditures, property tax revenue per capita, per capita government employment, and fiscal stress 2 (see Coe, 2007; Modlin & Stewart, 2014); political characteristics, including percent of residents registered as Republican and the percent of residents who voted for Trump in the 2016 Presidential election; and nonprofit characteristics, including nonprofit organizations per capita. 3
Variables, Sources, and Descriptive Statistics for All Variables Used in the Analysis.
Because estimation of the rate of volunteer involvement for each of the 10 programmatic areas assessed in our survey would yield sample sizes too small for statistical power and confidence, following the Census Bureau’s Federal, State, and Local Government Classification provided in the Government Finance and Employment Classification Manual (2006), we merged these 10 areas into five broader categories for analysis: (a) Education services (education and schools, libraries), (b) Social services (human services, social services, aging services, and community development; public health/health department), (c) Public safety services (fire, emergency management services, and ambulance; Sheriff’s Department, corrections, and judicial), (d) Environment and housing services (natural resources, environment, and recycling; parks and recreation; arts, culture, and museums), and (e) Governmental administration services (general administrative services). We examine volunteer use in the delivery of services by North Carolina county governments overall, and within these major service areas. We then turn to explaining the level of county government use of volunteers, operationalized as the number of service areas in which volunteers are involved.
Findings
Our sample consisting of completed surveys from 355 county officials is subject to biases in selection and response that we need to correct to derive valid estimates of volunteer use by North Carolina county governments. Our first goal is to estimate the extent to which county governments include volunteers in the delivery of services overall, and in the service domains of education, social services, public safety services, environment and housing, and governmental administration. To make these corrections to the sample, we follow a two-step procedure.
First, we obtained sampling weights to correct for differences in selection probabilities (over- or under-sampling of cases) of nonprobability sampling (purposive selection) used in our survey design. We used the number of county government employees to compute sampling weights as a normalized inverse of the inclusion probabilities. Second, we adjust the sampling weights to minimize the differences between known population totals and their weighted estimates by employing a calibration estimator with the auxiliary information. These procedures allow us to make adjustments to the sampling weights to reduce both nonresponse bias and sampling error (Kott, 2006; Lundström & Särndal, 1999; Särndal & Lundström, 2005, 2008). This approach is especially useful in the context of our study, where more than one individual (county government employee) is selected per county. The conventional post-stratification gives a different nonresponse weight to each individual, which may not be appropriate for county-level analyses. We address this issue by deriving estimators that use an iterative procedure to create calibrated weights that allow all employees within a county government to have the same weight. We employ a generalized regression (GREG) estimator (Deville & Särndal, 1992; Särndal, 2007; Särndal et al., 1992) to adjust the sampling weights by calibrating a sample to the marginal totals of the auxiliary variable in a linear regression model, which reduces the estimated standard errors.
The quality of the estimators depends on the strength of the auxiliary information. To be considered as the best auxiliary information, it must be related to the probability of survey response and to the outcome of interest. To identify auxiliary variables we examined county characteristics that are the most strongly associated with our outcome of interest (i.e., volunteer involvement). The literature cautions against deriving adjusted sampling weights based on more than two variables (Kolenikov, 2016). To evaluate this procedure, we employed two auxiliary variables, size (county population) and wealth (owner-occupied housing) simultaneously in calibration estimators to adjust sampling weights. However, the results show that using more than one county characteristic is not a feasible estimation strategy in our study due to high collinearity among the variables and the small number of observations. Accordingly, we selected county population, which had the highest correlation with volunteer use, to adjust the sampling weights to minimize the difference between known population totals and their weighted estimates (i.e., the weighted totals in the groups defined by county population are equal to the known survey population totals). With these adjustments, we are able to correct for sample bias and nonresponse to derive valid estimates of the rate of volunteer use by county governments overall, as well as in different service areas, and to test models of the level of volunteer use by counties.
Table 3 presents the findings regarding volunteer use overall in the counties and in the five service areas investigated. The first column of the table shows the unweighted estimates and the second column the weighted estimates of the rates of volunteer involvement. The unweighted (uncorrected) results show that over half the county officials sampled, 54% report that volunteers are involved in the delivery of county government services. Adjustment of these data with the sampling weight and the calibration scaling to correct for nonresponse and sample bias reveals an overestimation, however, so that the rate of volunteer use is less, just under half the sample or 49%. With respect to the different areas of service delivery, the weighted results show that the level of volunteer use is highest in education services—87%—followed by social services (60%), public safety (42%), governmental administration (26%), and environment and housing (5%). The adjustments to the original sample data shown in Table 3 suggest the value of our correction procedures. Overall, as well as in each service domain, with the possible exception of environment and housing, the extent of volunteer involvement is much higher than expected based on the research literature.
Percent of Volunteer Involvement Overall and by Service Area.
Based on the sampling weight and the calibration scaling correction for nonresponse and sample bias.
Table 3 shows the greatest change between the unweighted and weighted percentages in the area of environment and housing, from 54% to 5%. The difference between these estimates is likely attributable to the application of a calibration estimator to the small number of observations in this domain (N = 52). Literature suggests that post-stratification, calibration, and cell nonresponse adjustments require at least 50 respondents to achieve proper alignment between the sample and the known population figures (Kolenikov, 2016). Because the number of observations in environment and housing barely exceeds this criterion, the adjusted weights may have been inflated, leading to high sampling weights (see Gelman, 2007; Kalton & Flores-Cervantes, 2003; Kott, 1991, 2007). These results suggest that the initial, unweighted estimators of volunteer involvement in the environment and housing area were overestimated.
We next turn to explaining the extent of county government use of volunteers to deliver services. Whereas the previous analysis took the county official as the unit of analysis to probe volunteer use in particular service domains, in this analysis the focus is the county as a whole. Since we received survey responses from 94 of 100 counties, the N for the county-level analysis is 94. Our dependent variable consists of the number of service areas in which the counties enlist volunteers, from 0 to 5.
Based on the relevant literature summarized in Table 1, we first attempted to model the extent of county government use of volunteers to deliver services as a function of county sociodemographic characteristics, county government features, political climate, and nonprofit presence. We were stymied in this effort, however, by two factors: the small sample size (N = 94) poses limitations on multivariate analysis, and though grounded in the literature the potential explanatory variables are highly intercorrelated and heighten this problem. 4 Although these limitations preclude multivariate analysis of the county data, we are able to develop profiles of the counties, and to compare them, based on the degree to which the counties enlist volunteers in service delivery: not at all (in zero service areas), to a moderate extent (in one-two service areas), or to a large extent (in three or more service areas). Table 4 shows how the three groups of counties categorized according to their level of volunteer involvement differ according to the explanatory variables identified in the literature. We perform analysis of variance across the groups of counties on each variable to assess the statistical significance of the mean differences (null hypothesis: no difference).
Volunteer Involvement by County Profile Variables.
Note. Total number of counties N = 94. Table reports mean values of profile variables for counties using volunteers in no (zero) service areas, one-two service areas, and three or more service areas.
p < .10. **p < .05.
Because Table 4 presents the results of a series of bivariate analyses of variance rather than a multivariate model, the findings should be viewed with caution. Nevertheless, they are suggestive of the sources that may contribute to the use of volunteers by county governments to deliver services. As pointed out in the discussion of the sample corrections above, population is closely associated with the use of volunteers by counties: Larger counties tend to involve volunteers in more areas (p < .039). Counties with higher socioeconomic status, as measured by percent of the population holding a bachelor’s degree or more formal education (p < .018), higher per capita income (p < .078), and lower rates of unemployment (p < .019) also appear to involve volunteers in more service areas. Although other studies suggest that governments in urban jurisdictions are less likely to involve volunteers (Kang et al., in press; Sundeen, 1988), the dichotomous variable is not related to volunteer use among North Carolina counties.
By contrast, the variables pertaining to county government are associated with the use of volunteers to deliver services in more areas. Counties that spend more, as indicated by per capita expenditures (p < .051), and that receive more, as indicated by per capita revenue from property taxes (p < .027), tend to involve volunteers in more areas of service delivery. Yet, the number of county employees per capita is not associated with the level of volunteer involvement in a county.
Neither of the other two categories of independent variables that we examined in this study are related to volunteer involvement in service delivery across county governments in North Carolina. With respect to political variables, the percentage of the population registered as Republican as well as the percentage who voted for Trump in the 2016 Presidential election are not associated with volunteer use. We also explore the possible relationship between government use of volunteers and the presence of nonprofit organizations in a county, measured on a per capita and log transformation basis (to address skewing in the distribution). The number of nonprofit organizations per capita in a county as well as the log transformed nonprofit variable are not associated statistically with the use of volunteers by county government. Thus, these results do not support a “crowding in” effect whereby the presence of nonprofits in a county models or encourages volunteer use by government, or a “crowding out” effect in which nonprofits and county government may compete for volunteers. 5
Discussion
Over the past 30 years public needs and demands for services provided by government have escalated, while fiscal capacity has receded. Confronted with this dilemma, local governments, the evidence suggests, have been creative in seeking alternatives to assist in the delivery of services, such as collaboration, partnership, and privatization (Brown & Potoski, 2003; Hefetz & Warner, 2004). Despite the advantages that volunteers may afford governments as another alternative to assist in meeting service demands efficiently, the literature suggests that local governments have not sought a concomitant increase in the use of volunteers, and that volunteer use has declined over this period. Based on enhanced sampling procedures and methodology, this article investigates the apparent trend and attempts to explain statistically the involvement of volunteers by local governments to deliver services.
The results of our analysis suggest that volunteer involvement is much greater than anticipated relative to the main source of information in this domain, the series of surveys conducted by the International City County Management Association on local government alternative service delivery approaches and scholarly inquiry based on the surveys. The IMCA surveys demonstrate low use of volunteers by local governments in particular services, and an overall rate of involvement of perhaps one-quarter of local governments (Nesbit & Brudney, 2013, p. 39). Our findings show use of volunteers to assist in the delivery of services by approximately one-half of the sample of county government officials. Although our sample is constrained by its single-state focus, this study provides useful insights by deriving estimates of volunteer involvement overall and in major service domains in county governments drawn from a well-defined sample, and correcting for possible sample and response biases. We are confident that the implementation of our survey methodology and statistical corrections across broader samples would yield more reliable evidence concerning the use of volunteers by U.S. local governments.
We also examined the relationship between the extent of volunteer involvement by counties to deliver services and important categories of explanatory variables grounded in the scholarly literature: sociodemographic characteristics, county government features, political climate, and nonprofit presence. Based on careful review of the literature, we could identify only a handful of empirical studies seeking to explain volunteer involvement in local government service delivery (Brunet et al., 2001; Ferris, 1988; Kang, 2020; Kang et al., in press; Nesbit & Brudney, 2013). Similar to findings from previous empirical studies, our findings suggest that volunteer use is related most strongly to the sociodemographic characteristics of the county and the features of its government.
These results show that it is the larger, more prosperous counties—those with higher average per capita income, greater percentage of residents attaining a bachelor’s degree or higher education, and lower rate of unemployment—that are likely to involve volunteers in the delivery of more services. Counties that have higher per capita government spending and per capita property tax revenues likewise appear to use volunteers in more service domains, although efficiency considerations do not seem to make a difference: Per capita government employment by the counties does not distinguish volunteer involvement. And no evidence emerges from this study that a more conservative citizenry has a “taste” or preference for private sector approaches to government services, such as volunteer involvement (Kang et al., in press). The political variables are not related to use of volunteers—neither is the presence of nonprofit organizations in a county. Instead, these counties may be better able to “afford” the costs of volunteer involvement in service delivery (Brudney, 1990; Ivonchyk, 2019; Kang, 2019). A study comparing Georgia local governments between 1990 and 2003 by Gazley and Brudney (2005) likewise found that growth of volunteer involvement in local public service delivery was associated with more populous, financially healthier, and more urbanized communities.
The upshot of these findings is that the counties that enlist volunteers to assist in fewer service domains or none at all, may, nevertheless, have greater need for their involvement: These counties have a less munificent sociodemographic profile, which may stimulate greater demands for services from their citizens, yet lower government spending and revenues that may limit their ability to meet those demands. Moreover, the findings in Table 4 hint at a more stark “have”-”have not” distinction between counties: According to the county profile variables examined in our study, counties that do not use volunteers in service delivery or that use them to a moderate extent (in one-two service areas) are much more similar to each other than they are to the counties that involve volunteers to a large extent (in three or more service areas). Rather than a linear relationship with volunteer use increasing (or decreasing) steadily with the profile variables, the results intimate that counties may not use volunteers much in service delivery unless they are of a certain size with a foundation for their support, as reflected by the population and socioeconomic status of the citizenry and the expenditures and tax revenues of the county. Such a conjecture invites not only further research but also practical answers to support public service delivery under conditions of fiscal scarcity and a global health pandemic.
Writing in the wake of the tragic events of September 11, 2001, Gazley and Brudney (2005) were apprehensive that “the increase in public managers’ concerns that they lack the funding or staff to utilize volunteers suggests that governmental capacity remains the principal obstacle to greater volunteer involvement in local governments” (p. 131). Similarly, Choudhury (2010) argues that “simply waiting for more volunteers or maintaining the status quo on volunteerism will not guarantee the value adding advantages of public volunteering. Their realization depends on the agency level capacity to attract and manage volunteers on a regular basis” (p. 594). In the nonprofit sector (Hager & Brudney, 2004; Knepper et al., 2015; Rehnborg et al., 2010) as well as the public sector (Cuthill & Warburton, 2005; Nesbit et al., 2018), volunteer management capacity remains a concern. Local government leaders have proven adept at meeting the challenges of developing alternative ways to deliver services to meet rising public demands under trying fiscal conditions (Kim, 2018; Kim & Warner, 2016; Mohr et al., 2010). If they are willing to exercise comparable creativity with respect to involving volunteers, several practical means to increase local government capacity to support volunteers appear well within reach.
First, although commonly considered a resource for nonprofit organizations, the federal AmeriCorps (2021) program, funded by the Corporation for National and Community Service, is also open to government agencies, which may submit a grant proposal for service placement(s). Under 45 CFR § 2520.30—“What capacity-building activities may AmeriCorps members perform?” AmeriCorps members can engage in a variety of activities directed at strengthening volunteer management capacity and recruitment, including (a) enlisting, training, or coordinating volunteers; (b) helping an organization develop an effective volunteer management system; (c) organizing service days and other events in the community to increase citizen engagement; (d) promoting retention of volunteers by planning recognition events or providing ongoing support and follow-up to ensure that volunteers have a high-quality experience; and (e) assisting an organization in reaching out to individuals and communities of different backgrounds when encouraging volunteering to ensure that a breadth of experiences and expertise is represented in service activities.
Second, Prentice and Brudney (2018) elaborate a complex web of nonprofit infrastructure organizations (NIOs) intended to strengthen the effectiveness and capacity of nonprofit organizations. Their typology distinguishes NIOs intended to (a) strengthen the nonprofit sector, (b) build nonprofit capacity and provide professional development, and most important for present purposes, (c) build social capital and increase cross-sector collaboration in the local community. Included are nonprofit academic centers, community support organizations, and civil society support organizations that local government officials can call upon for assistance in developing volunteer management capacity. In follow-up research, Prentice and colleagues demonstrate how nonprofit infrastructure organizations have adapted to COVID-19 and continue to support the community (Prentice et al., 2020). In their comprehensive framework of factors affecting the scope of volunteer involvement, Nesbit et al. (2018) likewise highlight the importance of the “volunteer management infrastructure” in the environment surrounding public (and nonprofit) organizations, including volunteer centers, in mobilizing volunteer resources.
The study of Georgia local governments by Gazley and Brudney (2005, pp. 138–139) suggests that local governments can draw on this infrastructure to nurture their volunteer programs. The study showed that a community’s free-standing, independent volunteer resource center had a positive impact on local government volunteerism: Communities with volunteer resource centers were 15% more likely to involve volunteers in public service delivery (p < .04). Such reliance on NIOs was not unusual: Survey research indicated that nearly 90% of the volunteer centers in the national network of the Points of Light Foundation (89%) reported that they work with local government officials to promote volunteering (Brudney & Kim, 2003). Another means for local governments to build volunteer management capacity is to establish internship programs with other NIOs in the community, such as chapters of professional associations (Choudhury, 2010).
A third option for local government administrators is to contact the many university graduate degree programs in public administration, nonprofit administration, social work, and so on, to request a student-based project to build their volunteer management capacity. Master degree programs in these fields commonly require a culminating professional experience or project. With some projects group-based and others individual, a huge number of students in professional degree programs are potentially available, normally with the guidance of faculty members. Especially important in times of social distancing due to COVID-19, geographic proximity to institutions of higher learning need not pose an obstacle to the design or implementation of these volunteer programs. As Cravens and Ellis (2014) maintain, by the early 2010s “virtual volunteering” online through electronic means had become so common in volunteer programs that the basic principles of volunteer management should apply equally to volunteers working online or onsite, and online volunteers should be integrated into an organization’s overall strategy for involving volunteers. Relatedly, virtual volunteering, which calls for electronic rather than personal oversight, can be feasible and helpful to local governments in coping with a health pandemic.
As we mentioned, nonprofit organizations also struggle with volunteer management capacity (Hager & Brudney, 2004; Knepper et al., 2015; Nesbit et al., 2018; Rehnborg et al., 2010). Some of their responses are very low cost—yet surprisingly effective—and instructive for local governments. For example, many nonprofits use volunteers to manage and coordinate the volunteer program. Reporting on their analysis of a nationally representative survey of charities (N = 1,753 nonprofit organizations, including 1,354 that use volunteers), Hager and Brudney (2004) were surprised to observe that charities that use unpaid volunteers in the volunteer management role have net benefits just as high as charities that have paid volunteer coordinators who spend a substantial amount of time on volunteer management. This finding deserves greater study, although it does suggest that a committed unpaid coordinator can be as effective as a paid staffer, at least in some organizations. (p. 9)
Hager and Brudney (2004) speculated that unpaid coordinators are able to focus on their volunteer management tasks without the need to attend to other organizational roles, and that they may have a special rapport with other volunteers, thereby improving the experience and performance of the volunteer program. In other research based on the same nationally representative survey, Hager and Brudney (2015) found that having volunteers recruit other volunteers was related positively to both retention of volunteers (p < .001) and the net benefits of the volunteer program (p < .01). Although scant research compares volunteer-based programs across sectors (Brudney et al., 2018), nonprofit organizations have apparently succeeded in entrusting important elements of these programs to volunteers.
Conclusion
Our study has limitations that should be acknowledged. The findings are based on a cross-sectional survey undertaken in a single state at a single point in time. Although our sample design, methodology, and statistical adjustments to correct for sample and nonresponse bias offer several strengths and a firm foundation for the findings, our sample of county government officials remains relatively small (N = 355). While we received responses from 94% of North Carolina counties, the high intercorrelations among the potential explanatory variables at the county level combined with the sample size (N = 94) led to the use of a series of bivariate analyses, rather than multivariate analysis.
With regard to our single-state focus on North Carolina, we were not able to consider the possible effects of form of government on volunteer involvement as in some prior research (cf. Ferris, 1988; Kang et al., in press; Nesbit & Brudney, 2013): All county governments in the State have the same council-manager form. Furthermore, due to the lack of data availability, we were not able to include contracting-out by county governments (Kang et al., in press). Future research can extend our findings by investigating these potential influences on volunteer involvement in local government service delivery. Aside from this limitation, North Carolina has a varied economic base, diverse racial composition, considerable in-migration and growth, and resulting stresses on its governments, albeit no one state could reasonably be representative of all of the others. North Carolina is a growing state that faces pressures for service delivery similar to those of other states (Bowman & Parsons, 2013; Hoyman & McCall, 2010; Prentice et al., 2019), so that our analysis grounded in the research literature may be applied to the examination of volunteer involvement in other regional contexts. With respect to partisan politics, North Carolina is split relatively evenly by political party: It was a “swing state” in the 2016 Presidential election (and again in 2020), giving 49.8% of its vote to Republican Donald Trump, yet electing Democratic Governor Roy Cooper with 49%.
These limitations notwithstanding, the findings suggest that volunteer use by county governments is much higher than expected based on the extant literature. Overall, approximately one-half of the sample of county government officials in our sample report using volunteers to assist in the delivery of education services, social services, public safety services, environment and housing services, or governmental administration services, and in some of these areas use is even higher (education services and social services). Replication of the present study to yield empirical evidence regarding volunteer involvement in the delivery of local government services in a larger geography merits serious consideration. The need for such research is heightened by the fact that the field lacks contemporary data pertaining to government use of volunteers – when the recourse to volunteers could prove effectual for fiscally strapped (and other) governments striving to find resources to cope with the COVID-19 health pandemic. Even the federal government’s own semi-annual national surveys on volunteering administered by the U.S. Census Bureau (2017) fail to assess citizen volunteering in the public sector.
Examination of the incidence of volunteer involvement marks only the beginning of the questions that future research might pursue. Presumably, local government administrators seek volunteers because they offer certain advantages and minimize relative disadvantages. However, most of the research addressing volunteer involvement is grounded in the nonprofit sector, so that some scholars have hypothesized, but not been able to evaluate empirically, that the public and nonprofit sectors may differ in their use of volunteers and the concomitant advantages and disadvantages (Brudney et al., 2018). Information emanating from such inquiry could not only guide the field but also help to identify ways to relieve the stresses on local government.
The findings of our study suggest that counties may not use volunteers much in service delivery unless they have a foundation for their support, as reflected by such factors as population, socioeconomic status, public expenditures, and tax revenues. We have outlined options for building volunteer management capacity in county government that in our estimation promise not only low cost but also high return. If local governments bring the same ingenuity and creativity to building their capacity to support volunteer involvement as they have demonstrated in developing other alternative service delivery approaches in response to ongoing fiscal stress and devolution, practical answers appear available.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.