We thank the audiences for helpful comments and suggestions. Thanks to various colleagues who provided articles we could not find and who clarified their findings. We thank the editor and two anonymous referees of NVSQ for useful comments. Thanks to Esra Dursun and Barry Hoolwerf for research assistance.

Participation in voluntary associations is explained by different theories in sociology

This is the first of two articles in which we present a comprehensive review of the multi-disciplinary academic literature on philanthropy, identifying the predictors of charitable giving. For each predictor, we discuss the evidence for the mechanisms that may explain why the predictor is correlated with giving. We conclude with a brief agenda for future research. In this first article we present the evidence on the relationship of giving with religion, education, age, and socialization.

I study the relationships of resources and personality characteristics to charitable giving, postmortem organ donation, and blood donation in a nationwide sample of persons in households in the Netherlands. I find that specific personality characteristics are related to specific types of giving: agreeableness to blood donation, empathic concern to charitable giving, and prosocial value orientation to postmortem organ donation. I find that giving has a consistently stronger relation to human and social capital than to personality. Human capital increases giving; social capital increases giving only when it is approved by others. Effects of prosocial personality characteristics decline at higher levels of these characteristics. Effects of empathic concern, helpfulness, and social value orientations on generosity are mediated by verbal proficiency and church attendance.

Given the increasing numbers of scandals, the awareness among fund-raisers that