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Youth volunteering encourages young men from politically disengaged homes to vote for the first time by raising their interest in civic life, new analysis shows.

However, giving up their time for others doesn't have the same impact on young women from similar backgrounds, according to , which appears in Politics.

This could be due to young men and women choosing to volunteer in different ways.

The analysis suggests that volunteering leads young men from depoliticized households to become more interested in politics and believe in voting as a duty. Volunteering effectively removes the gap between politically engaged and non-engaged households.

Dr. Stuart Fox, from the University of Exeter, examined the effect of childhood volunteering on the likelihood of newly eligible voters participating in their first general election in the UK. He analyzed the relationship among volunteering, political engagement, and vote likelihood divided by gender and parents' political interests.

Dr. Fox said, "Volunteering had a positive, significant effect on political interest and civic duty for men from disengaged households. There were no such effects for women from disengaged backgrounds. This research shows youth volunteering can help to increase youth voter turnout and reduce socio-economic inequalities in the young people who do vote. This comes at the cost of widening the gender divide in turnout among young people from depoliticized, poorer households.

"While youth volunteering can reduce inequalities in political participation, this is only true for men; it does not overcome the differences in political participation and engagement between young men and women rooted in their respective socializing experiences and influences.

"Advocates of volunteering have a responsibility to find out how this can be changed. Advocates of other measures to address inequalities in electoral participation must establish the extent to which those approaches are also capable of overcoming deep-rooted structural obstacles to participation among under-represented groups."

Dr. Fox examined data in UKHLS, an annual panel survey of approximately 40,000 households in the UK. Every member of participating households over the age of 11 is surveyed, with information provided allowing respondents to be matched to their relatives. It collects data on volunteering, gender, political engagement and voting behavior. The information related to the 2015, 2017, and 2019 UK General Elections.

Men who volunteered gave an average score of 8.4 on a 0–10 vote likelihood scale, compared with 7.3 for those who did not volunteer; this 1.1 point gap is more than double that between women who volunteered (who gave a score of 7.6) and those who did not (7.1). This was despite young women being more likely to volunteer, with 30% doing so compared with 26% of young men.

Both men and women raised by disengaged parents received more of a boost to their vote likelihood from volunteering than those raised by parents who were politically disengaged.

The vote likelihood of women from disengaged households was 5.9 if they did not volunteer, compared with 6.9 if they did. The difference was 2.2 points for men from disengaged households (increasing from 5.4 to 7.6 if they volunteered) and 1.4 for those from engaged households.