To what degree do people adjust their political ideology in response to job loss? To answer this question, we draw on Dutch panel data over the period 2007–2016, paying special attention to the potential moderating role of various personal circumstances. We find that, on average, job loss triggers a leftward ideological response. Although small in size, this shock effect persists when people remain unemployed or find new employment, yet in the longer run it wears off. Furthermore, we find that job loss prompts a bigger shift to the left when people are simultaneously confronted with a major drop in household income, when they have fewer financial resources to serve as a buffer, and when they are more pessimistic about the economy. While we also observe many people who revise their ideology to the right during our study window, these rightward shifts do not seem driven by job loss experiences.

To what extent do voluntary organizations like sports, leisure, and neighborhood associations provide a platform where ethnic groups mingle and ethnic boundaries are overcome? This study uses unique panel data from the Netherlands Longitudinal Life Course Study (NELLS) to shed light on the integrative power of voluntary associations. I investigate decisions to join and leave associations of different ethnic composition, as a member or a volunteer, among individuals of Turkish, Moroccan, and native Dutch origin. In general, all ethnic groups are equally likely to join voluntary organizations, but ethnic minorities are more likely to leave than are Dutch natives, even after accounting for relevant sociodemographic characteristics. This alone explains ethnic minorities’ lower involvement rates. Moreover, joining decisions are characterized by strong ethnic sorting across organizations of different ethnic composition: people are much more likely to join associations containing fewer ethnic out-group members. This limits the potential of voluntary associations as pathways to social integration. In contrast, once the initial hurdle of getting involved has been taken, people are no more likely to disengage from organizations with more ethnic out-group members. Inter-ethnic neighborhood contact and the local supply of involvement opportunities are most influential in explaining the strong sorting tendencies in people’s joining decisions.

While there is a widespread belief that stable employment is important for social integration, stable employment careers have become less common in America's increasingly complex labor market. Job tenure has dropped, precarious work arrangements have gained prominence, longterm unemployment has spiked, and an increasing share of the jobless are not looking for work. Against this background, we investigate the linkages between labor market experiences and volunteer activities, as indicator of people's involvement in civic life. We outline a theory on how transitions between labor market states-within, into, and out of the labor force-bring about changes in civic engagement and test our predictions using panel data from the Current Population Survey 2002-2015. Contrary to what much previous research suggests, we find that people who become unemployed are more likely to start volunteering and no more likely to stop. We additionally show that people who leave the labor force altogether (i.e., not having a job nor looking for one) are more likely to stop volunteering. Conversely, entering the labor force, either by securing or searching for a job, is associated with an increase in volunteer activities. We explore the role of motivation and time resources in accounting for these patterns, finding among other things that moving into or out of the most detached labor market stateoutside the labor force without any intention to find work-is most consequential for civic engagement. We discuss the implications of our findings for civic democracy in light of ongoing labor market trends.

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Although there has been a fast rise in the share of Americans reporting no religion, it is unclear whether this trend has affected different parts of the country equally. Against this backdrop, we apply dynamic multilevel regression and poststratification (Dynamic MRP) to General Social Survey data over the period 1973 to 2018 to estimate state-level religious trends. We validate our estimates against external benchmarks, finding that they perform well in terms of predictive accuracy. Substantively, we find steeper increases in the share of religious nones in states that had more nones to begin with. Moreover, whereas state-level increases in the share of religious nones are strongly linked to declines in occasional church attendance and moderate religious identification, the associations with trends in regular attendance and strong identification are much weaker. States have thus not only diverged in their share of religious nones but also experienced different degrees of religious polarization.