How socio-economic inequality affects individuals’ civic engagement: a systematic literature review of empirical findings and theoretical explanations

Abstract Rising socio-economic inequality in many countries raises the question of how it affects individuals’ civic engagement in the forms of charitable giving, volunteering and non-profit membership. Though a growing body of multidisciplinary literature has started to address this issue, empirical results vary considerably and explanations about what underlies this relationship remain fragmentary. We thus conduct a systematic literature review to (a) provide a synopsis of empirical findings and (b) identify theoretical explanations and presumed mediating mechanisms underlying this relationship. Reviewing 70 studies, we find that higher inequality is most often negatively related to civic engagement, and that this relation is moderated by individual factors, for example, income and education. Furthermore, we map the proposed theoretical explanations into five key approaches. For each of these, we trace and identify the underlying mechanisms at both the societal and the individual level, and provide a conceptual framework that facilitates their empirical analysis in future.