Today’s young Europeans sit at the leading edge of a generational decline in electoral turnout: first-time voters are becoming increasingly unlikely to turnout, underpinning the development of lasting habits of abstention. This leaves them under-represented in policy-making and has prompted increased interest in policies that could encourage greater first-time voter turnout. Research on volunteering suggests that schemes such as National Citizen Service or European Voluntary Service could meet such a need, arguing that volunteering provides an opportunity to develop the social capital, political awareness and skills that encourage electoral participation. Such research suffers, however, from limited use of panel data with information on volunteering in childhood and voting in adulthood, and enabling researchers to control for causally antecedent factors encouraging both childhood volunteering and adult voting.

This study overcomes this limitation and provides the most robust analysis to date of the effect of childhood volunteering on first-time voter turnout. Using the United Kingdom Household Longitudinal Study and structural equation modelling, it shows that the benefits of childhood volunteering are frequently exaggerated because of a failure to account for childhood political interest and the political characteristics of parents during one's early socialisation. It also shows, however, that childhood volunteering does have a positive effect for those children raised by politically disengaged parents, who would otherwise be unlikely to develop an interest in political affairs. This means that while the benefits of volunteering schemes for democratic participation are frequently exaggerated, they do have the potential to help address generational turnout decline.